Second Thoughts

The Tragedy of the Commons: A History of Protest in Second Life in Five Acts

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Come to my SL20B Exhibit! There are more than a dozen freebies, many of them historic artifacts!

Among the rules for exhibitors at the SL birthdays -- which have grown more strict in recent years -- aside from the ban on commerce, tip jars, your company logo (!), etc., there is this:

*10. You may not use or display hate-oriented content at your SL20B build. Political affiliations, statements or content of any kind are not appropriate for the Birthday. The Second Life Birthday event is a place to celebrate the anniversary of Second Life and display creative endeavors by Residents. If you are not sure if something falls into these categories, contact a Mole Coordinator. You may not display content that expresses a political opinion or would defame, ridicule or disparage other residents or groups or Second Life. Any content that is deemed offensive, harassing, insulting or bullying will be removed, and the owner will be removed from the event. This will be determined by the staff of SL20B at their discretion. Their decisions are final.

As we know from the SL forums, the notion of "hate-oriented content" or content that "would defame, ridicule or disparage other residents or groups" are tremendously overbroad concepts and certainly don't pass muster for US First Amendent jurisprudence, and for that matter, even Art. 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a private corporation, Linden Lab is not required to supply First-Amendment level free speech, so and here we all are.

I view this as merely an interesting, challenging writing assignment to see if you can apply "the View from Nowhere" -- so hated in particular by leftist media critics like Jay Rosen. I feel such a "nowhere view" is actually a good thing when it consists of layered perspectives so that the reader can form their own judgement. In the old days, the New York Times would typically have a "nut graph" or a graph early in the story providing, say, five perspectives of an event. There would be the perpetrators, the victims, the bystanders, the experts, the government officials and so on. Reporters have given up investigating these perspectives; worse, they delegitimize many of them. 

I don't pretend to any full history of SL or even full (or especially unbiased) account of the events of protest in SL. But I was a witness of many of them and I think I can bring more information to the table. 

Why do I write such long posts? Because I think out loud and write as I go. You're not required to read them and can skim. This essay is broken up into 18 vignettes in world -- several cover one event or topic in two notecards, so the "vignettes" are not so distinct. Due to health issues, I hardly had any time to do this build and notecards and nearly dropped out. But I did want to be present for the historic SL20B and get this topic passed and validated. If you go to Tapestry of Time, or read the official 20th anniversary commemoration booklet, you realize the Lindens tend to reify certain events in their own corporate history (the "Prim Tax Revolt" is always worshipped as much as the "Boston Tea Party" in RL American history and simulates it, right down to crates of tea thrown into the ocean). They also tend to focus not on social developments that drive their software revisions, but technical issues -- now we have sculpties; now we have mesh; oh, there's a shiny, PBR, oh now we can finally link prims 64 meters apart from each other (which means you can put walls on a sky platform that size and link them finally).

Protests about how software affects organic people manifesting as avatars? Not so much.

That is one "use case"; there is another "edge case"; there is a "bug" or a "feature". The software-driven life, not based on any kinds of laws of nature or natural law or organic values,  which we have all lived thoroughly for 20 years has now invaded all of modern life in developed countries and will only become all-pervasive.

The recent fumblings by Meta (Facebook) and others with what purported to be "the dawn of the Metaverse" (which we know dawned in 2003 and had conferences and white papers by 2006!) and the reiteration of the wheel lets us know that we still don't have the necessary attention we deserve!

THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS: A HISTORY OF PROTEST IN SECOND LIFE IN FIVE ACTS

Welcome

Welcome to my exhibit for SL20B! I'm still a newbie at almost 19 years in SL now, but over the last two decades, I have done a lot of thinking about this glorious virtual Experiment in International Living which we have on these fair servers, and the lessons we can pass on to the new legless and blind Metaverse Engineers: leave in everything below the waist, keep the TVs off your nose and the boxes off your head, and zone, zone, zone.

Much of the stress and strife of virtual worlds and the cost in staff time and trouble in customer tickets can be boiled down to the Tragedy of the Commons. Read up on this concept if you haven't heard of it, but if you have been in SL for even 30 days, you've already lived it in the round.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

The Second Life grid represented as the paddocked green pastures of the islands and homesteads; the gated communities of Bellisseria; and the wild mainland where large eyesore builds, grid-wide transportation games, enormous RP castles, etc. contest for the view, amid clumps of wildflowers and manicured lawns.

Few remember now how the Electric Sheep company, one of the "Big Six" resident developers or "solutions providers" for outside RL companies in SL, managed to tag every single item in SL and then organize a global search around it, which led to an uproar as people's casual sale items left to $0 for their friends or their adult furniture was suddenly thrust into the public eye. Eventually, this led to an object menu section where you can check off "show in search," an item that is generally irrelevant now (does Firestorm's Area Search even require it?)

Many of the protests that developed in SL over the years related to the ruination of the virtual experience of the many by the few, and the effort by the platform providers to provide the maximum freedom of creativity to grow the world, but not yield to forces bent on destroying it to fulfill the whims of the few.

Within a few years of its founding, Second Life was forced to abandon the dream of harmonious civic life on a contiguous mainland and offer private islands for people to get away from each other, represented by the sheep paddock here, and give in to strenuous customer demand for planned communities with more rules and predictable content, which began with Brown and Boardman and continued to Bellisseria and similar Linden Home communities.

As in RL, citizen protest emerges against rules and against other citizens' groups with the dominant theme that Second Life is "not a country" (although founder Philip Rosedale said he was making one -- and did, whether recognized or not). It doesn't have the features of real-life liberal democracies or for that matter rigid authoritarian regimes but is a private company with a Terms of Service. We already live in the Customer Service State predicted by games theory thinker Edward Castronova (Escape to the Virtual World - 2008).

Yet there can never be enough staff time to address all the complaints accruing in a place where hell is other people - in 3D, streaming, and where even the most attentive and dedicated customer servants could please everybody. And so the "game" that has emerged throughout the years is to get enough attention to one's recipe for happiness and have the TOS amended in this or that direction. Some redactions occurred internally; others were a result of external pressure, whether by small groups or fare more rarely, by mass movements (which are almost impossible to form in SL for lots of reasons).

I have made 18 vignettes somewhat arbitrarily that illustrates this process; some deal with specific events in time, and others deal with chronic themes over the years.

History is written by the victors. And Mainland rentals agents are not the victors in this game. So this is understandably a dissident history, and features moments you may never have heard of, such as this: did you know that in 2004, you could be voted off your group land which you purchased on the auction and paid tier on regularly, by tenants who paid no tier? Did you know one resident company asked for an obtained a box on objects "show in search" to be able to search the entire grid and harvest the search results for their use? This feature remains today on object menus, largely unused or not understood. Did you know there was once a volunteers' group with 8000 residents in it who met in an enormous Greco-Roman palace?

Naturally some events have been left out and if you think of any that you believe should be included, ,leave a notecard in the Complaint Rockets to the right in the Better Living Through Land Impact room.

Be sure to pick up all the interesting historical freebies or art works, vote early and often on all your alts, and leave your actual signed notecard in the mailbox to bring back the Pony in the Welcome Area -- or any other feature request!

We find the drinks we offer from Kittykat Ninetail's "THIS IS MINE" dragon are perfect for reflecting on everything related to the cry of many a resident down through the years: "I get to do WTF I want on my land" -- and the consequences for us all. And you should sample beverages offered at further stations to bolster your stamina in considering SL's rich history, only a slice of which I am able to give here. If you remember these events differently -- write your own history!

I am grateful to my dear friend Alazarin Mondrian/Alazarin Mobius for helping me with the build and providing signage and props. Also special recognition of Bump Squeegee and Silas Merlin for their art works displayed here.

Happy SL20B!

Prokofy Neva, Curator

Content and Discontent, Richness and Sadness

Prelude
Content/Discontent

The entire history of massive online role-play games, virtual worlds, social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence could be summed up in this phrase:

Content/Discontent

Game gods, virtual world devs, social media entrepreneurs, VR devs and our newflangled "prompt engineers" all face the same dilemma:

They make a thing.
Some people like it; some don't, they vote with their feet.
They let people make a thing; some people don't like it, they leave (and you can't have their stuff)
They make a thing -- some people "take it to real," as the kids say, in RL courtrooms.
They don't make a thing -- people complain.
They make a thing -- people burn through it and want more.
They make a thing -- users break it.

You get the idea.

Lindens make a gorgeous virtual, contiguous world with a sun that rises and sets, a moon, trees, grass, flowers, and like God on the 6th day, they made fugly but serviceable avatars, and then doubled back later and put in fish.

The didn't have to make animals because Sion Zaius entered our world and created the sion chicken, whose food inworld is now literally running out because Sion had to go back to college. Content/Discontent.

The content which the Lindens enabled with their inworld building tools and permission for outworld uploads of textures, sounds, and later mesh, is rich, ornate, as intricate as Maru Kado's Kasamawashi animesh cat here.

But people have poor graphic cards; they experience lag; stuff breaks; *they* break it -- and, as Wallace Stevens says in "Gubbinal":

"The world is ugly and the people are sad."

They sit in the Sad Chair, they talk to their Sad Little Friend the Cloud, they do Sad Things that make more sadness.

Their loudest complaint is:

"This isn't like RL."

Linden Lab refuses to get involved in inter-resident disputes and prohibits the naming of names on the forums.

But if anyone, Linden or resident, makes rules for compatible living, someone is sure to feel too constrained and bark:

"This is TOO MUCH like RL."

Linden Lab has rules based on RL jurisdictions, prohibiting the crimes of gambling, fraud, child pornography etc -- none of which is sanitized by being virtualized.

Everyone finds their way across the thin line between Content and Discontent, or they don't find the thin line between Sanity or Insanity.

***

Act 1, Scene 1
Prim Hoarders

Every virtual schoolchild knows the glorious history of the Prim Tax Revolt, spoken of in reverent tones and told and retold to a high polish.

The reality is, some of the instigators were Linden alts, so it was one set of Lindens against another set of Lindens on a policy issue, with some residents getting involved.

Yes, wasn't it terrible, like some horrid oligarchic Scrooge, to charge people by the prim??? Gosh, that sounds like some rental agents we know!

But before there was the Prim Tax and the Prim Tax Revolt, there was another thing that is instructive to know about in terms of our Tragedy of the Commons, and that is: Prim Hoarding.

So in the old days, people would get a parcel of land, and because the prims could be accessed like a vast well on that sim for all (as they can in grouped land on Mainland rentals! Imagine!), some people would build huge, complex, and not necessarily beautiful builds. Although there are some fabulous old builds like the Cathedral in Mocha not to mention the wondrous Linden builds like the Moth Temple.

And some people who weren't particularly talented but thought that some day, they might want to build something or hire a builder, would stash hoards of prims under the ground to use them up -- a kind of prim-soaker. Of the type we had to keep in some sims (the Estonian Embassy in SL's cornflower crown was good for this purpose) to that *griefers* wouldn't fill the sim with griefcubes which used to make people's prims return to their inventories.

So people just rezzed out a bunch of cubes or some high-prim item -- and in those days, there was no "Convex," no no no.

So quite reasonably to deter that behaviour, which good will and good neighbourliness couldn't stop, the Lindens decided to charge by the prim. Then people, especially prim hoarders, rebelled.

Then they charged by the *meter* and made the number of prims per meter standard.

Progress.

So while there were many Lessons Learned and imposed, such as "be clear on your protest goals" or "use humour" or "be willing to compromise," there was another darker, force at work, which we already explained was Content/Discontent, and that is the Law of Virtuality -- somebody is always making a thing, and somebody else doesn't like that thing, or wants to hog resources to themselves, and prevent others from having them.

In RL, there is "tort law" and laws about "attractive nuisances" and "zoning" but in SL, we have meters and standard number of prims -- or land impact as they are now known (virtually the same).

Be grateful.

***

Act 1, Scene 2
Magic Wand vs. Griefcube

After the Lindens rested on the 7th day, their residents got to work building out the world, in some ways worse -- much worse -- and some ways better, but that was the plan, and we all know that God loves us and has a plan for us, don't we?

So somewhere along here in the early days there was a wondrous magician named Starax who made an amazing wand. This wand, when clicked, could produce all kinds of things from detailed, anatomically correct Vertu Cows to goldfish and lions and horses (and we don't really know because we're newbies, and missed that early chapter but someone will catch us up.)

So these items would come out of the wand at a clip and replicate across a sim. They were on temp rez, so it didn't seem like such a big deal.

Meanwhile, less creative sorts who read the Something Awful forums, and later 4chan, thought it would be fun to go around and find items that people had rezzed out from the Linden Library, such as Philip's Party hat, which the Lindens had thoughtfully left on all perms to help people "share" and "create". (Now they've gone in the opposite direction and put things on no transfer which is a shame, but you'll see why in a minute.)

So not before long, sims would be regularly deluged with self-replicating cubes, often with horrendously ugly, vulgar, and illegal images on them, and typically with some nonsense being spouted and sometimes numbered prims announcing their births rapidly in chat. Often, this would crash a sim, if some other sim crashing device wasn't used.

And the beauty part? As they had originated from an individual resident's library, and then been seized because they were pre-checked on "share" and all perms, they could now look as if they were grief objects made by that prim creator, who was then vilified and AR'd as a griefer, instead of the victim of a griefer. That's why you always need to look at the prim *owner* or deployer in a grief attack.

These mass attacks would occur particularly during public events, like the goodbye party for Robin Linden, an early VP. Or during a town hall. Philip got so mad once he threatened to call the FBI. The entire grid would be shut down sometimes for days at a time -- essentially, this was a DDoS attack, with zero-day exploits.

Lindens scampered around trying to patch exploits and built what they called a "grey goo fence" which stopped self-replicating prims at least from crossing borders, or replicating as fast...or something -- get Andrew Linden to tell you if you can find him (he is no longer on staff).

But that nerfed Starax's Wand and a great outcry went up on the forums and in the land. Now, the forums are typically read in any game or world by less than 5% of the user population, but still, it Had an Effect, which is always the goal. It seemd Starax's Wand could still work, in a way, but by then, Starax had stomped out of the world. Of course, he was later to appear on an alt and work for one of the big RL developers but not everyone remembers that part. There was even a little Starax museum in Patagonia which we helped to keep free of weeds and Starax himself apparently came to it.

We can't represent all the forms of griefing here which are myriad and diverse and wondrous, even more than Starax's wand, or the Mysti-Tool, or Alazarin's 600-prim castles or anc's friedberry gatchas, my personal favourite. Because if we represented them, we'd be banned here. So take it on faith -- griefers wrecked havoc for at least 5 solid years before the worst of them either were finally banned or grew up in RL and got jobs at Intel and other virtual world competitors-- which maybe this was what it was all about all along.

Some people weren't affected by griefing and never thought it was a big deal; others experienced it daily and filed ARs that went nowhere for years on end. There was a strange drama of "allowing creativity" and "complying with TOS 2(c)" -- a now removed section of the TOS which we personally found useful which went something like this "interfering with the enjoyment of Second Life by other residents."

There is much that is overbroad in the TOS and some found that particular clause overbroad, but it fits. The Golden Rule still works pretty well as an organic norm often hard to enforce in code.

Griefing -- more than high cost, lag, curbs on lifestyles, etc. -- has likely caused more protest than any other thing in SL, but only the Lindens know how the ARs are trending as they no longer publish their partial Police Blotter which was helpful.

Enhancement of the land tools -- which we couldn't fit in to this exhibit -- helped control the experience more and more for residents -- they could turn off fly to prevent griefer swarms, although this also prevents much of the thrill of SL as the avian creatures we are. They can turn off scripts for "everyone" and only enable "group" to run them, which can be closed. And so on.

If working the land controls isn't enough, a newer sort of Linden now with names like Governance4 Linden tell you to file ARs accurately and in detail and they will have an effect.

Everyone knows ARs seldom work, but the workarounds that evolved to fill this gap -- various resident vigilante groups -- can be worse -- and again, space and time did not allow us to enlarge on that topic which in SL terms, is actually an interesting prequel to the Edward Snowden story.

Remember: if you are ever cage-bombed, the trick is just to sit on anything or be animated by any object.

***

Act 1, Scene 3
Griefer U

The visible or physical destruction of griefers is one topic, but there are myriad forms of other types of griefing -- ranging from briefly amusing chat to repetitive spam to annoying catcalls to actionable hate speech and more.

And there are all kinds of tricks and fakes and maneuvers especially making extensive use of the affordances of alts and the ability to fly (which is why "fly" is turned off in so many places.)

One might say that while SL is a place of enormous creativity where many have found friends and even soul mates for life, it is also a place offering incredible opportunities to inflict pain on other human beings.

There are certain extremist scholars who view offenses against RL social norms and corporate terms of service as merely "transgressive" or "ludic" or "neuro-atypical" and fascinating subjects of study to be encouraged and kept free of condemnation. But the people who live in virtual worlds tend to realize at some level that if there is something you are doing that you wouldn't do in your grandmother's living room, maybe you shouldn't be doing it, or at least not in public.

Is griefing a legitimate form of protest or merely another form of crime? We're going to go with Door No. 2. If you want to oppose The Man and knock over the twin towers as "satire," do it on your own sim at least. But you don't have a sim, do you? Or even a micro-parcel. So that's why you're griefing in a sandbox, eh?

Sometimes these behaviours are blessed as "emergent" by the platform providers who, after all, never forget that they are a Lab and we are all in an experiment.

Other times, they are allowed for a while -- sometimes years -- and then disallowed suddenly, and we don't always know why.

Extraordinary feats of kindness and self-sacrifice have been made on this grid along with extraordinary feats of cruelty -- but if you gave your log-on to someone else, that's on you. Protest as you will, LL doesn't get involved. And so on. The line is drawn clearly there.

Elsewhere, as a one-time VP at LL asked pointedly about the activity possible on a 16 m microparcel: "What are you doing on there, your knitting?"

Make a parade of alts to spy on or harass a lover who rejected you -- likely you'll be able to get away with it although in theory, this can be grounds for action. There isn't any limit on the number of basic or premium accounts any more "as long as they are not used for ill" as a top Linden explained -- but this has to be tested through the AR process by others.

One thing is certain, this Road to Hell is paved with the good intention of Encouraging Creativity.

The RL effigies of myself allowed to proliferate on my virtual lawns for years on end and the packs of Soviet palaces and Stalinist regalia were creative, I suppose -- prim sculpture really is a wonder and a lost art, at that, nowadays! But if the sacred pledge of virtual world makers to their denizens -- that if it is not on the profile inworld, it is not fair game -- is to retain its glory, then it has to stick for everybody, not just people you like.

Then on a separate but related topic, I personally wonder if art requiring virtual platforms and artificial intelligence can rightfully be called "art" in the full sense and I prefer to call it "artifacturing" when it comes to MidJourney although I concede that the creations of SL are far more like RL creations.

Trust me, I am unable to keep my hand and eye straight long enough to paint anything remotely like this Blue Owl on Porcelain Cup and I even manged to flunk art class in High School.

And I'm not so sure of the meaning of this Blue Owl which I personally didn't make at all but merely "prompted" to be scraped from the chaos of images on the Internet like the bits of chainsawed books in "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinges in a strange future library which were glued back together virtually!

In fact, somebody who can actually make a nice little Blue Owl like Dalriada Delwood of MOoH! is much the greater artist.

But even she may have gone on the Internet to get ideas because haven't we all?

Still, it's hard to imagine why even the mundane creativity of norms living in little houses on the hillside with picket fences and decorating with the top Coastal Grandma decorators of Happy Weekends had to die for Plastic Duck. You know?

Yet all of us had to have a little bit of them die in order that Plastic Duck live -- although have you noticed he hasn't been around for ages?

At a certain point when the drive to allow creativity out of some socialist ideological fervour or technolibertarian fever dream crashes on the reality of user attrition and less sales of regions and more abandoned land, the Lindens do act. Protest works.

It just takes a long time.

And I think in the long, run, we'd all rather have our legs. PS our eyes free to look at RL along with SL at the same time.

***

Act 1, Scene 4
Ad Farmers

As long as there has been land enabled for sale in SL, there have been extortionists finding ways to get people to "buy back the view" -- or even buy passage out of their own property without ban lines.

Ad farmers buy up cheap parcels and cut them into small pieces and then put an outrageous price on it to encourage people near the land -- which may sprout spinning cubes, laggy cubes, large billboards that encroach elsewhere, etc. -- to "buy back the view."

Few remember how these micro-parcels first appeared, unless they were born during the early years when "First Land" was available -- and they clicked the wrong button on the land menu.

: (

If you clicked "abandon" by intention or mistake, your land would fall into 16 m2 parcels -- that means 32 individual 16m parcels which rapidly fell prey to swift or bot-deploying land barons who bought them for $16 meter before you could scarcely gather your wits. Well, you'll be sure not to do THAT again -- except you might, again, by mistake, on another account, or comfort a friend who fell prey to the same insanity. That is why among the reforms to the land tools were "scare screens" with "Do you really want to abandon your land?" -- and then this fall-into-pieces system was retired and the full lot would abandon intact.

The theory of the insta-chop-up was that your neighbours, all being people of good will, would only take what they needed for extra prims -- why there might be several cheerful souls right on your sim who would take the few prims each, leaving it for others to take as needed, like a pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, right?

Except like a lot of things in SL, it didn't work that way until many years later, bots were banned for use in land purchases -- although the amazing speed at which certain barons show up at your elbow if you mistakingly click "anyone" when attempting to put land to sale to yourself or another person.

But to back up a bit, we spent many years -- from about 2004-2008 or four long years -- protesting the land extortion racket to the Lindens and trying to get them to adopt a policy about it.

This wasn't easy, because there were many legitimate uses of microparcels -- some people made maps, or surveyed the grid, or monitored which sims were sharing which server (contiguous land is not necessarily on the same server) or provided freebies for new residents or created various types of stations for RP games. The Lindens couldn't investigate every 16 m2 parcel and ARs were not always made in good faith as the AR system itself was always wielded in various internecine resident group wars.

Even so, it was pretty clear if you followed the money and followed the alts, which tended to have to be in the same groups and tended to win the same auctions -- which in the old days, helpfully showed the name of the avatar who won the auction.

Several groups sprang up to try to rescue abandoned land in tiny amounts and put trees or seating on it like mini-parks, or AR'd ad cutters and urged people not to buy the microplots and feed the madness.

Eventually after many meetings with Lindens, various townhalls, blogs, petitions and even a "Zoo of Ad Farmers" with the hope that "name and shame" might work (it seldom does in anonymous virtual worlds), the Lindens devised a policy where ad parcels had to be limited to one per sim, and the signs put on them could not be obtrusive or encroaching.

The problem is that some land barons bought up microparcels and re-rented or re-sold them and didn't always police their tenants; there are always those bold enough to park a giant billboard like the one shown here and root it on a 16 m2 to make it sit over Linden road shoulder. So it's an endless maintenance chore.

The ad farm situation is better than it used to be 10 or 15 years ago, but it is still a major maintenance and AR chore for both Lindens and land owners. There are ALWAYS edge-casers. There are even some who deploy the famous "Good Neighbour" kiosk with rules to live by many agree on to keep sims looking nice -- and use them to force people away from their land.

Island dealers could only gleefully follow the sufferings of Mainland dealers and deploy their own billboards, "Want to Get Away from Mainland Blight? Come to the Islands!" which only added to the problem.

Our own view is that only preventing land under 128 m2 from selling to anyone but its owner to change its group (or not at all) along with a managed, networked, tasteful Linden-owned ad system on roadsides and in infohubs and welcome areas (as there used to be) will fix this problem by replacing what drives it: the demand for advertising that can reach eyeballs, in a world where there always is too much bad advertising and not enough good advertising reaching people who can make use of it. Lindens shy away from billboard blight, but their own Mole billboards used as teleporter boards or other signage let us know they can make fun or even beautiful billboards and sell the ad space on them to residents.

Along the way might come a total ban on all resident roadside advertising, because Lindens prefer to use code-as-law rather than organic policy to solve problems because they can't eat up staff time. It really is a dilemma for the most well-intentioned.

Lindens also devised a policy some years ago that land under 96 m2 cannot show up in search. This prevented the use of microparcels to game traffic, by creating dozens of them at a venue and skewing search results.

Residents trying to maintain their properties are also vexed by giant air towers, spires, spinning orbs, and all kinds of junk deployed even on land not for sale -- for reasons that often escape passers-by. Lindens will sometimes act if there is a cluster of these nuisance towers, but given that their policy is about *advertising* or *sale* of land, just putting up a giant nuisance tower worthy of St. Simeon Stylites is not enough to get Governance Lindens to act.

Suffice it to say, the struggle over micro-parcel sales and ads, while abated some over the years with a series of Linden policies in response to resident protest, will continue until some greater intervention is devised.

See if you can guess why there is a box of donuts in the middle of these microparcels for sale, and those with correct answers will win a free prize.

***

Act 2, Scene 1
The Pizza Guy

Protests against prim taxes or Mainland griefing or Copybot are often the best known form of protests and viewed as the most successful in SL.

But in my view, the protest against the voting function in the original version of groups in SL, and removal of the feature of "officer recall" was among the greatest achievements in SL.

On January 14, 2006, I posted a blog titled
"Imagine if the Pizza Guy Stole LL"

The fanciful premise of this essay was to compare what the group tools enable/impose on SL businesses and non-profit groups with their equivalents in real life.

What if, in order merely to enable the pizza guy to make and then deliver a pizza and set it down in your office, you had to also enable the delivery man to take your office from you and be cut into all your profits?

Cory Linden (Cory Ondrejka) saw the post and discussed it with Philip Linden and they could see the point that I and other land owners had been making for many months to no avail. The original group tools were intended for collaborative projects of various types, whether communities of affinity or discussion groups, but not originally envisioned with land, which developed over time as a product available as "First Land" inworld to newbies or from auctions arranged by LL (mainly of entire sims when the world was growing by leaps and bounds).

Faced with the problem of how to have tenants join a group to set their vendors and wares out for sale, ,yet not be able to cause any damage or return any builds, Anshe Chung and other land barons used to switch out their entire malls to other groups every night manually, to make prims not set to the tenant's group disappear or to manage other aspects of a mall such as parceling, then put it back into the tenant's group again.

In SL, I found that I could create a land group and group my land as the system encouraged to get 10% more tier to apply for extra prims. The Lindens invented group land to facilitate communal activity -- which they idealized -- particularly group building -- an activity which has featured over the years more as a distant ideal than a typical reality.

Most builds are done by either a landowner herself, solo, or she hires someone else to build for her, or groups cooperating on builds do them either in serial fashion or with separate assignments -- a simultaneous group build with some people casually able to return the prims of others they don't like using the "share" feature is not the norm -- in fact, like blowing up land to terraform it, we could describe it as "declining" and not "emergent" behaviour.

But if I decided, for the convenient of my tenants, to have an open group anyone could join on the honour system to set prims on the parcel they were renting -- a behaviour seemingly consistent with the hippie-style commune nature of early group tools -- then any member of the group could trigger "officer recall" and vote me out of the group, and off land that I had purchased and paid the tier for.

In the early version of groups, all payments to the group, such as from a deeded vendor or a land sale, distributed exactly equally to all the group members -- there wasn't even a way (as there is now) to distribute according to the Soviet reformist maxim: "from each according to his ability; to each according to his work". And all group fees or "dwell" -- a form of incentive based on land traffic in the early days -- also distributed equally.

"Officer Recall" was clearly invented with the ideal of having civilian control over leaders manifested within the virtual world, as a way to prevent tyranny. But like other well-intentioned world-construction decisions made by the platform providers, it was not used by people of good will but used by bad actors, or sometimes triggered by mistake. The tyranny became the few over the many.

While the vote played out over 3 days, the officer with the group powers could not use them - he was prevented from thereby selling the group land to another group or expelling those who triggered the disruptive recall and continued to grief in other ways.

This in turn caused many businesses to fill their groups with multiple officer alts who, in the event of the recall of one officer by bad actors, they could keep their land and control their groups.

Then LL decided to crack down on the proliferation of premium accounts, which people would buy for their then-512 m,2 tier allocation and ability to buy "First Land" for $512, and misuse the function intended for a one-time help to make up an entire sim of $1/m land at a time when entire sims sold for thousands of US dollars on the auction. Residents were ordered to cut the number of their accounts to five, and cancel the rest.

When I cancelled my accounts, I wrote the reason for making the alt in the first instance -- to prevent the destructiveness of "officer recall". Philip then caught up with me at a RL meet-up -- the first SLCC in October 2005 in conjunction with the "State of Play" conference at NY Law School and asked me why I had done that.

Yes, people held conferences about the Metaverse in *2003*, although some think the Metaverse was invented by Meta in October 2023, 20 years later!

I sat down at a computer terminal and showed Philip how group land worked and the problem with "officer recall" -- it wasn't the first or the last time that an interesting discussion with him revealed that he was not familiar with every aspect of his creation and their ramifications!

I once complained to Philip that a book device released by a resident for the occasion of Cory Doctorow's appearance in SL and his giving away of his work "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" was not on "mod," and couldn't really be hailed as the "first printing press" as so many were saying.

(You can find a free copy at this station by clicking around.)

Of course, freedom of the press belongs to him who owns one, as the old saying goes, but Philip's response was one I never forgot:

"Someone will make everything."

He was absolutely confident that anything that was needed in the virtual world would be made; if one product or tool or script wasn't optimal, someone would make another and it would get better.

This has happened slowly and unevenly, and "someone comes to town" is overbalanced by "someone leaves town" constantly in SL.

***

I'm not doing so well in this poll, as it seems 430 people want to permaban me, but I also discovered this old script doesn't work any more to stop more than one vote on one avatar. So somebody may have had the patience to click this 430 times, who knows.

Act 2, Scene 2
Group Tools Reform

The reform of the Group Tools in 2005-2006 is one of the most fascinating -- and overlooked -- chapters of Second Life history.

It's hard to remember now, but long before Twitter, long before Facebook, even Second Life groups had real-time chat with numerous people, and the ability to hold talks in world with the ability to save transcripts. The first person to make an RT on Twitter was actually a Second Life resident -- because they were already familiar with that gesture from a very good early form of social media inside this virtual world: group chat.

The flaws of the current iteration of Groups tends to overshadow how truly clunky the tools were in the early years and fails to recognize that the cure for the key beef nowadays about Groups -- chat lags or doesn't work at all -- is simple:

Discord.

And really most games and worlds have always cultivated outworld solutions for inworld communications that either were too clunky or too heavily moderated: TeamSpeak, Gchat, Skype, Twitter, etc. There are actually SLers still on Plurk, which you never heard of. So we can't take the knock on Group chat seriously when there is such an easy workaround -- Discord, used by numerous merchants and affinity groups.

Next. We saw how in "The Pizza Guy," there were terrible flaws in the group originally created by that unique amalgam of technolibertarianism and technocommunism that makes up the ideology of our beloved Lab. Never change, LL!

But Lindens could see the problem themselves in their own groups they needed to accomplish inworld tasks from land management and customer service to staff meetings.

So they launched on a total reform of the groups and began by convening a series of inworld workshops with interested residents. Up until that time, the top Lindens would hold town halls on four-sim corners to maximize the number of participants "in person," then make available relays (they looked like old-fashioned radios) for any resident to hold a listening party on their own sim. They also began holding office hours and in the early years, they would even do walkabouts on the telehubs and welcome areas and talk to residents.

But to my recollection, the Group Tools conferences were the first of their type where people were in smaller working groups with Lindens, asking questions and proposing alternatives and getting feedback. It's one thing to protest, including with your feet, but it's another thing to try to work out alternatives and solutions.

The different-sized Laminak tables here with mismatched chairs represent the results -- more granulated tools, more flexibility, more possibilities for everyone, but not a perfect fit. Along the way, the Lindens faced demands such as a desire to have all owners to join simultaneously so that no one owner would be controlling the admission of another, but that was not technically possible.

Some Lindens kept failing to understand that "officer recall" might be a boon in a hippie commune where everyone put in 512, but one person was hogging the prims on group land that was collectivized, but in a rentals operation, where prims had to be managed fairly and apportioned, it was a bane. When I explained how "officer recall" could be used perniciously, a Linden told me that I would just have to lobby the other group members and prove to them that I was a good manager.

Except...I had paid for the land, and continued to pay the tier every month, and collect the rent to pay that tier. If someone felt that arrangement was tyrannical, they should refund or not rent in the first place -- the premise is different.

So land could be stolen by one rogue officer, taken away from the owners who paid for it and worked it, under the guise of "democracy".

When they finally grasped this, the Lindens went overboard and removed voting completely from the group tools. I remember one of the last (the last?) votes in a group of 8,000 people called "Concierge" at the time (which has now been revised as "MonCierge") and a proposition was mounted to protest changes to the TOS regarding copyright and LL's use of resident content, which many were unhappy with.

It may have been that the lag induced by having to check group membership and handle poll questions was too great, but like other early democratic features of SL, it was deprecated for the greater good.

While there was a certain amount of Sturm und Drang in the group tools process, and the Lindens never returned to quite this "workshop" format (the select "focus groups" with special friends was not as open and democratic and under NDA) -- it did bring about one of the greatest achievements of Second Life: tools to enable the kind of differentiated roles and granulation of function needed for every kind of group on group land or private land, whether a small group of friends, an RP sim, a store, a rentals agency, a university, NASA, or really anything you could think of with more than one person -- and some people took a group of alts to group their land and gain the tier bonus and ease of management.

The beauty of the group tools comes in the Roles, which can be calibrated or granulated to give people greater or lesser amounts of control of land, suited to their role -- as a partner in an RP community, as a romantic partner, as a tenant in a rental, as a shopper in a store, as an employee in a non-profit. So once the roles were set up properly there were the issues of cash and property -- deciding whether people could remove group-set prims, or equally receive all proceeds from a land or objects sale -- now there was no forced collectivization.

There are still some annoyances with groups -- search does not work with a pasted in name but only the first few letters can be typed to find it manually; after about 350 members, the land groups don't load so well; at 500 members the Lindens decided to make a bug a feature -- the group members cannot see the others in the group. This is not an option to select, so that say, shoppers are not "outed" to each other, but evidently a default. The groups can be hidden from one's profile.

The groups can still be griefed, especially if open -- people still invade them begging for cash, or spamming ads for their store, or spouting trash about other residents, sometimes pretending to be "bots," and we find all too often, group members believe an anonymous day-old alt ranting in their group, instead of someone in business for years in SL. But these problems are fixable by moderators with the ability first to select who can speak and second, who must be kicked from the group to maintain decorum. After all, if anyone is unhappy with a group's rules and management style, they can form their own group for 100L.

The fact that a key feature of the new Premium Plus account is 140 groups lets us know just how important groups are to Second Life. We never thought we'd use them all up, but we did and have to constantly leave some to make room for others.

***

Act 2, Scene 3
Mentors

There's a lot I could say about the Mentor.

Or maybe just a little, because this new version of them coming up may not last, like past iterations.

Mentors are older residents deployed to welcome areas, infohubs, etc. to help new members of SL.

They exist both as the result of protest about lack of care of newbies and retention -- which is bad in general for business and socializing. And themselves become the subject of protest when they inevitably fail to produce results that fit everyone's ideal society.

Remember your high school government? OK, everyone wants an ideal society, but no one wants to put in the work and those that do become martyrs or villains.

So people protest the various forms that Mentors have taken over the years as examples of favouritism or ineffective onboarding; but people also protest the lack of any kind of systematic efforts to retain new people when business begins to lag and concurrency falters. Periodically a forums or blog post or a RL news story refreshes the sense of futility and despair.

So let us just contemplate in general the Bonfire of Bad Ideas, which included things in the long-ago past when group tools were being reformed, such as "let's have islands where the residents can only file an AR with the island owner". This would be great for certain types of RP, said a Linden no longer on staff. This will be great for Retention because people will be Free.

We felt that if, for example, subs in highly authoritarian forms of RP were forced to give their passwords to abusive doms under threat of ban or worse, or forced to do things against the TOS, they should have the right to make a private AR to the Lab, where the name would not be publicized, and some person in authority could in theory respond to the situation if it was not a mere resident-to-resident dispute. Fortunately, that's more or less the regimen we have today, with no "home rule" for islands as much as it might be desirable in some aspects.

Another really hard-and-fast rule has been that only Lindens can ban from Linden land. This always seemed like a really, really good idea to us for any Mentors or related volunteer program, even though as we run a resident infohub on Governor Linden land (an old program following the demise of the Telehubs and the collapse of the first rendition of the Infohubs -- there are 10 of them) -- we have often wished we could ban the people who specifically came to grief us, and put out large pictures of our RL selves on the land using rogue viewers.

In our view, only paid, full-time, benefited staff can help entry and retention in RL as in SL. But it's a luxury for the Customer Service State so there is always the temptation to reach for Ladies' Auxilaries or druzhenniki (auxilary police).

The interesting feature of the newest rendition of Mentors is that prospective Helpful Hals and Helpful Hannahs must agree to work two-hour shifts for free, and promote the SL viewer unless asked about alternatives. Inevitably the cry went up to provide some perks or gifts for such shift-working Mentors. (Hey, I know, let's have them put their stores right at the first landing, as was done in the past.) Having worked far longer shifts for less than minimum wage in RL and SL, I think I'll pass.

Still, I'd invite you to look into the face of this sad and tired boy in Silas Merlin's sculpture. His feet are blistered from running as a First Person Shooter without even a voice, as in Zelda, and he has run many, many a mile across games and worlds and now arrived in SL. He stares listlessly into the distance, idly wondering whether SL is a game, or what the heck it is. A kind bird, but a bird spouting incoherent nonsense nonetheless, tells him that F1 is in the Viewer now.

He doesn't know what F1 is, or what a Viewer is, but ok....

Can't anyone HELP??!

I could go on, but I can only say Sic Transit, Gloria Mundi.

I have one name for you -- "Lucy Linden".

And I have one region for you -- "Tenera".

Look it up.

***

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

***

Act 3, Scene 1
Telehubs>>p2p

The Lindens always said they felt guilty as game gods with god modes that we mortals did not have, so they were keen to add point-to-point teleportation (p2p) as quickly as possible.

The anti-telehub lobby on the forums was strong, in part for justified reasons as some telehubs had become avatar traps and lag monsters when surrounded by heavily trafficked malls -- which were there because the way people used to get around in SL was by first going to a central telehub in a region, then flying on their own steam (or taking a jetpack or plane or boat) to their final destination.

I remember Waterhead Telehub, which I used to call "Headbangers' Ball," because each time you landed there, you banged your avatar's head on the ceiling inside the building -- the landing wasn't put outside for the longest time.

Then I would have to fly 1,000 solid meters, often in strong headwinds with tough sim crossings, to my first auction-won sim of Ravenglass. It hadn't occured to me when I got it that getting to it would be such a problem (and I actually won an auction once in Portage where I quite simply could not get to the sim due to the lack of void sims at the time and difficult sim crossings).

Unless I stayed put on that sim and never went anywhere -- and that's actually how a lot of early pioneers lived, not usually traveling that much because it was a chore.

And those with businesses now located 1000 or 2000 or more meters or many sims away from a centralized telehub sprouting a giant mall felt shafted, and left behind by "Progress".

THAT drove a lot of animosity to the telehubs, which Philip Linden had invented under the influence of the theories of urban planner Jane Jacobs.

Jacobs envisioned hubs in New York City which often came into being, where a subway stop or a stop below the El would engender stores, services, large apartment buildings, parks where people would congregate when they came home from work -- or conversely, in the areas where they went to work.

Philip reasoned that the virtual world could operate the same way -- and he was right. The problem is that not every one shared his embrace of commerce and some people thought virtual worlds would be better off without malls.

Or at least...there could be the highly specialized boutiques of some early designers, where new designers could sometimes get a corner if they essentially elected to serve as apprentices or unpaid clerical and PR staff. But these were located far from telehubs, and wasn't it terrible that now these newbies competed with them!

Anshe Chung may have commandeered most of the telehub-adjacent land through market capture, but she was democratic about her rental tenants -- anyone who was willing to pay the somewhat higher rent -- even another land agent -- could get a space. That's how I got my first office at a mall in Clunn -- that has remained abandoned land now for many years.

I once asked Philip Linden which sims had the most sales on them and he said quite frankly, "The telehubs." Telehub land would command double and triple and more the average land price -- and new ones continued to be rolled out despite some residents' and Lindens' protests -- and often in bucolic surroundings with plenty of space around their squat, concrete Chicago urban style to make them less "avatar traps" with the inevitable malls that appeared around them. The Moth Temple in Iris didn't start as a hub -- but ended as one with the most beautiful build of all of them.

Then Anshe Chung and a few others noticed something that wasn't readily apparent to non-tech types -- the Lindens were tinkering with the world map. They were preparing it for the day when anyone could click on one point on the map -- and directly travel to it from any other point, hopefully not landing in deep water or the side of a wall (which oddly didn't work for telehub sims where the landing was forcibly set -- and never changed, which is why you land in the water in Ross, for example.)

Suddenly, Anshe stopped renting out the telehub land she won at auction -- she used to keep the stores of her regular clients and put them out herself for their convenience to set up right away. Instead, she put the land to sale.

A new generation of would-be land barons snapped them up, and were thrilled at the opportunity. One built a Wild West sort of mall around Midge. Lindens publicly expressed their skepticism about the usefulness of telehubs, and one day I took Robin Linden on a tour of telehubs, so that she could see with her eyes that they were not all like Fuji -- the notorious avatar trap that was the reason for so much animosity. By that time Brownlee had been deployed -- although not yet with the Mole's juice bar. As we stopped at each telehub, we would see friends or various people who recognized her and we would chat and look into some stores. The telehubs functioned in fact as envisioned and weren't the lag mess claimed.

But the Lindens were determined to go ahead with their plan to abolish the telehubs as forced landings, install p2p, and convert the old telehubs merely to company inifohubs with their own kiosks with information about orientation and buying Lindens, etc.

Your faithful servant snapped the last picture of a telehub, carrying a poster "Save Our Hubs!" before Lindens gleefully deleted it, which at that time was posted on the Snapzilla-run device for anyone to put pictures on the Linden front page (that didn't last for long, obviously).

Then there was ANOTHER kind of telehub protest -- one that wasn't covered by the media or the forums in particular, but was also one of the most important protests of SL history:

http://alphavilleherald.com/2005/12/extra_extra_bar.html

The newbie land barons, seeing now the writing on the wall, felt they'd been sold a pig in a poke. Even Anshe began to realize the full extent of the damage -- the new infohubs would not be a draw and the malls around them would get overgrown with grass -- much like the malls of RL America with the appearance of the Internet, then later COVID. The Lindens tried to desperately drum up interest in the infohubs by sponsoring a hippo contest -- anyone could take a basic hippo model (the Lindens had adopted the hippo as their mascot due to some arcane coding term) and embellish it into a character. You can see ours in a tree at Memory Bazaar in Ross.

But before p2p was installed, another stage in this drama unfurled, which was the launching of the Heterocera continent withhout any telehubs at all. Everyone had to fly over rough seas to get there -- and a few enterprising souls started ferries and planes to haul people to the new paradise.

Forums regs rhapsodized about land unspoiled by urban and commercial blight -- the Lindens also staged a short-lived experiment in leaving Linden trees and grass on parcels, rooted elsewhere, so that they could not be removed. This forced pastoral idyll didn't go over well with people who bought land on the auctions -- unlike those on the forums who lived back at the ranch on the Colour Sims of the first days of SL.

Somewhere along this road I learned from Xenon Linden, the builder of the Moth Temple, that a telehub didn't have to be a squat, ugly, bug -- like the ones you see here (take a free one home, they're sort of cute when shrunk!) -- but could be anything, with an invisible telehub landing disc inside the build (as in Iris).

As it became clear that telehubs were going away for good, there were now dozens of very angry customers, who began to mutter legal phrases like "bait and switch," and demanded a meeting with Philip and other Lindens.

They threatened to "cash out" and stop buying on the auction unless their now worthless telehub land was bought back. Philip made an offer to buy back telehub land at the rate of $7.5/meter (not the $10 or $20 or $30 once enjoyed), and many took him up on his offer. The Lindens said that if anyone opted to keep their telehub and not take a buy-back, they could submit a proposal in a competition to have their group run an infohub on Governor Linden's old land, set to their group.

After they shelled out a fortune in buy-backs, which they had once taken in on the auction, the Lindens still prevailed. They rolled out some beautiful new sandy and pine-tree covered sims that looked like private islands, with new textures, but which were actually still mainland -- the sims are named for artists and scientists. In order to keep their market share, Anshe and others had to buy those new sims -- using their telehub buyback funds and more.

This was one of the turning points for some land barons in departing the Mainland forever and working exclusively with islands and homesteads.

***

Act 3, Scene 2
Copybot

The story of the pernicious script known as "Copybot" unleashed in Second Life is well known and covered in all major studies and articles about SL, Google is your friend.

But I'd like to recount some aspects of the story not covered as much as the main outlines of the crisis, which involved hundreds of angry and frightened virtual merchants -- some fearful of their RL livelihoods -- shuttering their stores, blocking their vendors or asking mall agents like me to put up ban lines -- and refusing to sell until the Lindens "did something".

Cynics ridiculed their scandal as "little dressmakers' holocaust" but perhaps didn't realize the scale and numbers of "little dressmakers" who at least offset the considerable costs of SL (especially for second- and third-world nations) or actually covered RL bills with their virtual wares.

Many on the Internet and most in Second Life are aware of an essential truism known technically as "the analog hole" -- if you can see something on your screen, if it has been streamed or displayed to you through your browser, you can copy it in a variety of ways, even if some deterrents are deployed.

The greatest wonder of Second Life is the permissions systems enabling a choice among modify/copy/transfer because it enables manufacturing and shopping -- "a willing buyer meets a willing seller over a price" -- the most prevalent activity of SL, dwarfing even socializing, sex, games, or music. And the miracle is that these permissions hold, and not as mere markers for a social norm easily overridden. While rogue viewers and techniques have abounded, generally their deployers are caught and barred from SL, with notable exceptions especially in gacha rares.

The cynics said that everyone should simply "Get Real" and live with the fact that everything online is copyable and they should just allow copying and distribute freebies and make their living on, oh, volumes of sales, or custom work, or -- like the authors who claim they sell books by giving away books, make money on the Ted Talk circuit, if they can break into it.

But people who had benefitted from the genius of C/M/T and the regime that seemed to hold, felt Something Should be Done. They didn't feel they should be driven into the chore of RL DMCA takedown notices, or registering their mark, or engaging in any RL business necessities if the whole point of a virtual world was to make more possibility and enable more people to benefit from the Internet instead of seeing it destroy their livelihoods.

I personally was summoned to a sim and had a gleefully malicious griefer boy copy my avatar and array out a dozen of him as he roared with laughter. Not being much of a clothes horse, I didn't immediately see the disaster involved in this prank, which I thought would just lead to a lot of mistaken identity and griefing episodes. Years later, I went to a Metaverse conference in 2007 (yes we had those! Before 2023! Let Grandpa put in his teeth and tell you the story!). A group of us went to a bar and I fell into a long and interesting conversation with Raph Koster, the famous game designer (Star Wars Galaxy etc). He had invented at that time a prototype open sourced open-ended sandbox sort of world-not-game which he used to flesh out ideas for how to make these worlds work, and which some of us had joined. As he spoke and I asked a lot of probing questions (about copyright issues, for one), I noticed a very young boy, too young to be served in the bar and whose mother may not have liked that he was out this late), edging closer and closer to the conversation, but not speaking out of shyness.

Finally, people began to head off to bed and just the boy remained. I asked him what his name was in SL -- and it turned out he was a notorious griefer, and the copybot deployer. He said he lived in his mom's basement -- "But I pay her some rent," he added defensively. "Where's Dad" is a question I had long learned not to ask any more.

"Why????" I finally asked in despair. Why the griefing, the ban evasions, the theft.

"Because the Internet poisoned my soul," he said in all seriousness.

The story of Copybot actually begins much earlier, when a group which I'll dub "Perverse Engineers" reverse-engineered the viewer -- an action that was in violation of the TOS of that era. These fellows set about god-moding and stalking and harassing and griefing people around the grid and of course contrived to copy especially textures, which anyone could do with a series of steps right within even the legal viewer at the time. Some of us AR'd what we felt was an obvious TOS violation but apparently they had some encouragement from some Lindens -- because the Lindens were about to open-source their viewer *anyways*.

When the time came to ask questions on the forums for the Town Hall -- as we still do today -- I asked pointedly why this group was allowed to reverse engineer the viewer and grief people. For this I was banned from the forums, but still remained to attend the town hall. Somehow the question had still reached Cory Linden, and he read it aloud and began to answer it. Just then an avatar of a few days with a name created to look like mine began swooping around and heckling people -- and to no one's surprise, *I* was soon looking at the ominous "administrative time-out" screen and cooling my heels back in RL. When I emerged an hour later, I found a bunch of the particularly tough looking Perverse Engineers flanked around Philip as if holding him in protective custody.

Just as I could not prove I was not a camel, I could not prove I had not done any swooping, although server records would show it. Or maybe not.

The viewer was open sourced, and Cory Linden then left the Lab, some said over a dispute with Philip over whether the server code should be open sourced as well.

It so happened that I was in touch with some of the Peverse Engineers who came to the old Sutherland Dam discussions on Friday nights which I hosted, one of whom sadly died in a car accident in RL at a very young age. I was tipped off that one of the big developer firms working with RL companies had ordered "Copybot" to be coded (or a version of it) to make instances for live music concerts -- shards, as in a game, where the band would be mirrored many times over to enable thousands of people to see those avatars. This seemed like a super-structure in search of a base, if not an accident going somewhere to happen -- and sure enough it did.

Copybot had a thousands midwives and no paternity, however and while I had sources for this story they needed to hold on to their jobs and their sponsorships so we had to issue a retraction at the SL Herald, the notorious muck-raking tabloid of the early years of SL edited by Urizenus Sklar and Pixeleen Mistral.

While not everyone wants to connect up the dots, the Copybot scandal led to Linden policies about Third-Party viewers, and various showdowns and knockdowns and revisions along these lines -- and lots of dead sion chickens kicked offworld, let us just put it that way for now.

We now live under a regime where "Copybot can't be stopped" because "you can't stop Copybot" and inworld groups devoted to copybotting and a Github page with the Copybot script persist "because it can," but Lindens still insisting that certain groups have their leaders step down to spend more time with their families and revise their inworld activities.

While once "unlawful copying" was an offense contained in the Abuse Report template that could be submitted and sometimes get action even without an additional DMCA, today, that category is gone from the AR form.

Copybot compelled the Lindens to change wording in their TOS and attempt to remedy the complaints of masses of merchants -- and this wording was to be redacting and changed and dropped over time leading to more protests and walk-outs.

Merchants then tried their own remedies, which included the completely ineffectual script you see here that would supposedly spam a copybotting viewer or script and get it to stop.

Today, the mechanism for copybotting is different than those used in earlier days and some people feel it is "less of a problem" while others weep constantly on social media about how they've been targeted. The breedables industry has been particularly hit with mutual recriminations and even RL lawsuits.

There's one category of creator who ostensibly never has to worry about Copybot, as their creations execute server side and not client side: the scripter. The one recorded instance of the copybotting of closed scripts is disputed.

It is no surprise that those whose work is most protected against copyright are more cynical about the complaints about those who are most vulnerable to theft -- even to denouncing certain anti-rez scripts that work well enough, if not perfectly, particularly for those compelled to comply with full-perm mesh makers' TOS.

Merchants have responded to the challenge either by giving away more freebies; building up loyal client lists and doing custom work; putting their items in bags or HUDs or other types of packages that ostensibly deter theft; banning people and their alts with illegal IP detection systems; not putting their products on "mod" -- although this has zero deterrence value.

Surprisingly, in the food sector, some major creators simply put the takeaway food on all perms -- because when you get down to it, who is going to bother to re-sell a fork with a bit of chicken on it at an odd angle, or a tilted wine glass? It doesn't matter.

And some full perm creators have in fact specified in their TOS that for props such as food givers, they suspend their usual mandate to bar "transfer" -- but then they specify that "no mod" must be used. Well, at least a script is safe that way, although of course the whole lot can be bundled into a separate box. Of course, most people -- again -- buy platters of food for their beauty on the table, not in the hand, and the market for plywood boxes with famous creator's food bits in it is strangely....empty.

As with a lot of situations in Second Life, the hysterical hypothetical need not apply, and the edge case need not drive policy.

Even so, for many sectors of the virtual market -- bodies, beasts, buildings -- copying remains a serious threat and causes people to give up, to go to other third-party model sites and reduce their contribution to SL. And who can blame them, those "little dressmakers" in war-torn Ukraine or refugee overflowing and earthquake stricken Turkey or crisis-ridden Brazil? Or even a COVID-ravaged city in affluent America.

The dream of anonymously marketing your virtual wares on the strength of your talent and your constructed persona, free of taxation of bricks-and-mortar costs or real-world authorities with their hands out, dies hard, but the hill it dies first on is Copybot.

***

Act 3, Scene 3
Welcome Areas

If you TP into the original welcome areas of Violet or Ahern or Ambat these days, chances are you will find they are pretty quiet. There might be a newbie or two struggling, spread-eagled, with appearance or standing in bewilderment or AFK. A lone, sad older resident might also be AFK with a sign over her head: RENT ME.

One reason is a curious recent development: the Lindens have removed the term "infohub" from map search. While the infohub symbol remains on the map, and browsing the map can turn up such spaces, they are no longer in search at all.

Instead, we have a brand new set of Welcome Hubs with shopping, ersatz gambling, a sandbox, and tutorials, and new mentors. *Some* old infohubs still retain the ability to set home (this function has been removed from many of them despite the confusing message that you can set home on Mainland hubs).

As the great baseball legend Yogi Berra might have put it, The Welcome Areas (infohubs, orientation islands, hangouts and other Linden-owned areas) are so crowded nobody goes there anymore.

But if you know to hunt for "Social Island" and some of the newer entry points (Firestorm Island, Belli Hub) you might find 40 avatars filling the sim, or at least 6, with much the same mixture of useful help and trash talk as the old days. Yet no pickets

At one time, every ongoing protest in SL would play out in the Welcome Areas, whether against VAT tax, or ad farming, or putting Voice into SL (denounced as a ruiner of magic and outer of genders by quite a few, and today -- as I can attest from looking at many, many parcels -- Voice is often turned OFF or sometimes fails to work in public events).

Early throngs of hardy residents would go to Governor Linden's mansion in Clementina to protest, but that was before they learned she was never, ever, there. Yes, she. We have seen her twice in our 19 years!

There are still public spaces where newbies are heckled as I can attest from rolling a new alt the other day but generally, this type of behaviour was thoroughly discouraged. Even so, there are patches of "wall sitters" as they were dubbed -- groups of bored, restless youth (or senior delinquents who should know better) who voiced inappropriately for the rating and confused or ridiculed the new arrivals. Other bands of residents would fight them -- and then the welcome areas as such would become the theme of protest.

I suppose the earlier renditions of them could be called sort of Hyde Parks, especially when the famous Jeska Linden would tell people sparring on the forums to "take it inworld," in the theory that if you could see your antagonizer in person, you might be nicer to them. We're here to tell you that doesn't work, just like a demand for RL names, age, location, occupation don't help social media to become more tolerant, either.

Recently I came across a resident who had returned after many years, and wrote this in her profile:

"In 2006, Second Life was wild and unpredictable and amazing. Mass user protests, mafia gangs, and land barons. Ready, Player One! Snowcrash coming!

Second Life is prettier now, but something is missing. It seems reserved, careful, and a bit cold. The unpredictability is gone. Maybe everyone just grew up. The unknown is known. Limits set. Expectations in place."

Experiments in what might be called "managed democracy" haven't exactly proliferated in SL but there have been some:

o the original Linden walkabouts -- it's hard to believe now that Jack Linden, a computer professional with considerable RL experience, who began as a modest liaison in SL and worked his way up to VP, would actually stand in the WAs for hours on end, and hold office hours frequently to wrestle all the most urgent questions of the day, such as ad farm destruction of the Mainland.

o town halls (which were more interactive with spontaneous questions rather than lists submitted and curated by talk show hosts)

o workshops on specific issues such as reform of the Group Tools

o focus groups (yes, LL used to select some of their special friends to come all expense paid to California and give feedback, all placed under NDA)

o RL meetups -- a series of SL community conferences under various auspices with varying degrees of disaster were held over the years 2004 to 2012 before they broke down and devolved into inworld Open Sim conferences or select groups such as Educators, to which Lindens were invited to speak

o the Features Voting Tool -- this was actually a really great page in which anyone could submit a proposal and collect votes for it. It should simply have been left alone. It wasn't. A "helpful" resident who actually seemed bent on destroying it offered to help "clean it up" and went to the Lindens first with a list of duplicates, in his view, then with a list of "undoables" or "poorly worded" proposals -- and busy Lindens were grateful for his input. As the FVT, which had grown thick and dense vines around a weak trunk, began to be pruned, authors of proposals began to howl, since they didn't think they were "undoable" -- and the Lindens should decide this, rather than residents with agendas. One day we woked up and the FVT had been deleted entirely by a Linden.

o the old JIRA voting system -- at one time, it was possible to make a JIRA proposal specifically about bugs but also about features, more broadly understood, which would then also be about policies, and also collect votes. Today, since the reconfiguration of the JIRA under Oz Linden, the system is very different.

At one time, your faithful correspondent introduced a proposal that was revolutionary -- that anyone could continue to collect votes for a bug report/feature request and JIRAs could only be closed by Lindens who made a judgement of "can't do". The volunteer helpers who pruned the JIRA and similar systems would not be allowed to close anyone else's JIRA. This essentially opened up a way to create a "no" vote to the hall monitors who inevitably appear to clean up in any group, sometimes with the tacit approval of the company. Amazingly, this proposal was passed, and implemented -- but then removed some years later.

We could note the chief flaw of these voting systems is that you couldn't vote "no". Voting "no" is vital to any democracy and a part of any robust proposition system on local ballots. But in the ideologies of Silicon Valley, voting "no" is viewed as "negative," or an anomaly in the system. Some people think it is "not possible" to vote "no" on the JIRA as configured for use by Linden Lab.

But I caught up with the makers of JIRA at TechCrunch one year and quizzed them on this. They confirmed that any client of the JIRA could configure it to vote "no," but also had trouble understanding why it is necessary. There is a tendency to think that "upvoting" or "getting to yes" or "taking a straw poll" or "direct voting" is going to "fix" democracy. It never has.

The "no" vote -- especially with the added functionality of undisclosed vote -- is absolutely essential and would rid both Lindens and residents of a lot of their illusions if incorporated, and redistribute the balance of power. Even if the "no" vote became only symbolic, it would have a cumulative effect.

We felt so strongly about this that at one point, we created a "JIRA Mirror" where people could collect mirror votes on JIRAs they had posted, and of course the results were fascinating. There is more on this subject in other venues, but one thing Governor Linden might consider doing in honour of the 20th Birthday is to pardon those banned from the JIRA.

Today, certain factions hijack the forums occasionally with impunity; Moles, who were once associated only with creative endeavours are now diverted to loathsome moderation duties; and various groups associated with large continents or large stores or RP groups tend to hold sway.

There isn't any form of democracy today within Second Life across the grid, and the efforts to create the institutions of democracy outside of it (such as the Herald online tabloid or various professor and game developer blogs) have all fallen into disrepair. If the Customer Service State gives people more or less what they want -- if there is a product and they themselves aren't made the product -- they are content and don't see the need for dissent.

For a brief moment in time, relatively, on the old forums, we had the Features Voting System and even large group voting tools even in Concierge; we had live interactive townhalls and a far more free-wheeling forums -- go and look:

Don't be afraid of scary warnings -- the Lindens didn't update their certificate but it's a perfectly safe site. Try it on Edge if Chrome doesn't work.

If there is "socialism in one sim," it doesn't count, because such RP expeditions don't influence policy for the grid; it is Solzhenitsyn's idea of democracy but not Sakharov's.

People who regularly talk to their Mole and Linden friends, who bid in charity auctions to have sims named after them, who have their weddings in new community centers, they don't see what the problem is here!

"Lindens are a scarce resource," a Linden once commented in an office hour with many residents clamouring for this or that change. And indeed they are, and that's why virtual world construction can't rely on them.

Lindens have put up with so many protests about lag over the years (even Linden Lags parody t-shirts) that they have now put a button right in the viewer under WORLD called IMPROVE GRAPHICS SPEED.

Our advice is to never touch that button.

[Linden Lags Tshirt]

***

Act 3, Scene 4
FIX SEARCH

There's a lot I could tell you about this subject -- I've written reams and reams.

One way to sum it up is this: In the beginning of our world, the button on the viewer to get your virtual world started was titled:

FIND

And you did.

Now it's called SEARCH. So you keep SEARCHING.

In 2012, the Lindens decided to move from Viewer 1.23 to Viewer 2.0 by decision of then-CTO Oz Linden, immortalized here with the "mirrors" he promised would come some day (and so they have in PBR, we're told).

The Search in 2.0 had a terrible interface, the Lindens used Google Search Appliance instead of the interface and code they had before, and it simply stopped working. There were many layers to this decline but the Lindens then -- as now -- insisted they were working out the bugs and improving it.

Meanwhile, Firestorm "forked" so to speak, and KEPT the version of search from 1.23 which the Lindens then RETIRED.

We have Cinders Roxley to thank for this decision and this effort, which is why we have a statue in her honour at the Lost Gardens of Slosser.

The decision to keep a normal search that returns clean lines on an exact word search of a person or business or venue meant -- was, among other reasons, but in my view the KEY reason -- that Firestorm began to be used by likely 80% or more of the user population, by the Lindens' own admission. They say they can't give precise numbers because the same people use different viewers but we have our sampling of tenants which have convinced us there are only four of us: -- me, another oldbie like me with failing eyesight, a newbie who just landed and hasn't gotten the memo, and some guy testing his furry avatars on different viewers. The end.

What has kept our world thriving all this time is the ability of people to SHOP, and GO TO THE PLACES, and BUY and then FIND A HOME and live happily ever after. You know?

All you have to do is search for a business or location -- "Linden Lab" is one good one to test -- on both viewers, and I won't have to keep explaining this. I use Alchemy personally to see my own Search/Places ads.

I've learned this will never change; this is cast in stone; this is a religion. So I step away quietly and go on Alchemy as needed and muddle along.

What keeps me occasionally returning to this topic is I remember a night in...2018? Before the pandemic, anyway. When I saw search was broken and not returning as it did -- which at that juncture wasn't great, but still had some use. And various Lindens hurried to fix it, and within 48 hours, it was back to status quo ante. Then on another night in 2019? (before the pandemic) it broke again.

And stayed that way. And got worse. And some obvious problems were fixed but basically, the interface today -- well go look.

The Lindens need to fiix search. Then they'll have a growing world. They don't want to, possibly because they actually need to throttle growth given insufficient resources, so they don't.

***

Act 4, Scene 1
Price Drop/Fee/Tax Hike

Surely after years -- decades -- of protests, SL's protesters would be ready to retire?

After all, they now have Linden Assisted Living -- Bellisseria, Fantasseria, Sakurasseria and the soon-to-come Ponderosaserria with enormous 2048 m2 ranch spreads.

These zoned and better-managed regions with new mesh customizable houses are an answer to the chronic protest of people on the Mainland facing blight, or lonely islanders in silos left with no-show landlords. Bellisseria is the best product that Linden ever made, although the bien pensant falsely believe it to be "like" the Stepford Wives.

It's actually more like Trumansville, if you pay attention.

Bellisseria only bred the desire for more and better and different and more prims and more meters -- remember the Prelude, Content/Discontent?

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have enough prims -- but we'll let you in on a secret: most tenants do not use all their prims, far from it. And another secret: mesh items aren't necessarily a lot less land impact.

So now that the wolf at the door is merely a lawn ornament; Honey West whom you were too little to watch is a hipster collage and you even have a plaster elephant -- 10 prims! -- on your lawn, just like the neighbour's! ----

Why are you still protesting? You got homesteads without having to first buy an island. They're unattached and proliferating now and filling up with big ugly black boxes just like the Mainland -- but now there will be 2028 ranchettes!

WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING?

If you have a comment, you can rocket right out of here!

LOL

Although first, leave a notecard.

But we'll tell you what people still find to protest:

o the fee increases for purchase of Lindens and cashouts which came soon enough after the lowering of the cost of tier and the increase of prims per square meter;

o application of US state taxes -- ouch, ouch, ouch (unless you're in like Montana);

o more fee hikes for conversion of Lindens to dollars and process of credits;

o lack of void sims laid out in a row from their Mainland properties with money-making venues and the newest Bellissseria content;

o the strangulation of the Mainland in various ways;

The Russians have an idiom: "frenzied from fat".

One thing we've noticed: if you complain about lack of managed land in SL, you will get what you wished. So be careful what you wish for.

***

Act 4, Scene 2
GachaPWND

The ban in August 2021 on gachas, a form of commerce involving selling sets of items via random pulls, sparked massive protests on the forums and social media on both sides of the issue. I believe it was the biggest blow to the virtual economy in 20 years, and we are still feeling the dead cat bounce two years later.

As usual, those backing the company policy (especially those who benefited) were eager to leverage their loyal positions to harass and silence opponents. Threads were closed, forums bans were handed out, and some lawyers got bully pulpits that others didn't, but there was no recourse: the ban hammer went down, merchants had 30 days to get rid of the machines or face disciplinary actions.

The word "gacha" comes from the Japanese term "gachapon" the term for machines containing small prizes for a few coins -- they were originally modeled after the American gumball machines found outside supermarkets.

The SL edition also began at a low price of 25L for a few decor items and evolved into mechanisms to sell sets of fancy hair for 100L. While there was also a vocal chorus preaching against the Las Vegas/Lost Wages aspect of the gacha, they were massively popular. If you asked the critics claiming they were "shocked that gambling was permitted in the house" and told them to turn out their inventories, you might find a croupier would appear and say, as to Capt. Renault, "Your winnings, sir."

While the opponents of gachas tended to focus on the random nature and the enormous amounts people would pour into them to get the "rares," they key feature of the gacha phenomenon, which ran for more than a decade, was that it was a way for people to enter the economy if they had no skills in design or coding and insufficient capital to start a land-related business. People hoping to offset the cost of SL, which can be considerable even just to buy a socially acceptable outfit and body) are able to buy low and sell high or sell in high volume, as they can with breedables.

Gacha machines have also been a way for creators to make sales at themed mass shopping events in an environment where they are increasingly competing for attention in search among a proliferation of weekend and weekday sales.

While many people have the impression that some law was passed in the States or some prosecutor overseas sent a warning from another country such as Germany or Japan, in fact there is no such law or warning, at least known to the public.

There is a US law on online gambling such as poker which prompted Linden Lab to ban slot machines, poker, roulette etc years ago. But recent court cases have found in fact that judges sided with the big platforms Google and Apple regarding lootboxes -- which strictly speaking, is a different animal than a gacha as gachas in SL are not required to advance gameplay as it is not a game as such. And in theory, minors under the age of 18 should not be on the plaform (although 16-18 years are permitted in G areas). The main driver of the lootbox lawsuits were parents angered at children running up credit card bills to play an online game.

The US is a country of common law where judicial interpretation and legal precedents establish the law of the land and where international law or law from other countries is not self-executing. Again, there was no judicial ruling to prompt this policy.

But since Linden Lab is a private company it can make any policy it deems necessary, and in this case took preemptive action to limit liability for litigation, a standard business case.

The irony is that while the old form of gachas were banned, a new form emerged called Miepon or other names that still involved machines with sets of desirable decor or outfits, but you could see which one you would be purchasing in a chute -- removing the mystery of the blind pull. To be sure, you can't be sure when the coveted rare will come which means the aftermarket and the Lost Wages are still relevant,

Even so, there is no question that the overall level of gacha frenzy is considerably reduced. The shock to the economy was considerable and some merchants ended up out of business. The critics who sneered at them that they couldn't drive traffic to their stores are forgetting that this is an attention economy -- search functions poorly, there is both too little advertising of the right kind and too much spam, and mass events by large companies (viewed by some as cartels) heavily influence the market against "a nation of shop-keepers".

The inimitable Daveosaurus of Crocodoggle, beloved in SL as both a developer and DJ, created a parody item called "GachaPWND" with a play on the term "gachapon" and the kids' term of art for being beaten in a game -- "pawned". Merchants who had drained the pockets of their fans in search of "rares" now got their comeuppance. But since clever designers and scripters ultimately succeeded in keeping the broad outlines of the gacha experience and some of the re-sale economy intact, who was really PWND?

The constant proliferation of new weekend or weekday or really 24/7/ sales which were weakening the economy for creators before the ban has not compensated for the role played by gachas in the economy -- hence even more appearing every week. Every inventory is bursting and every home is flooded, and no one could possibly wear all the outfits they have purchased even if they changed their clothes 10 times a day. This is a feature of virtuality that hasn't been sufficiently studied -- with the ability to replicate without expending RL materials (except server space) and when goods don't wear out, economies seem magical.

But when inventories are so large they can't even be searched anymore, and every weekend sale living room set looks like the other one, have we discovered why virtual economies always tend toward entropy and failure? Or maybe not?

Now we've also deployed Daveosaurus broken gacha machine to symbolize a "gated community" of sorts -- Linden Homes, the answer to the Second Life Tragedy of the Commons for tens of thousands of people who now don't have to wake up and find anything unpredictable in their view.

Critics of Linden Homes have likened them to the movie Stepford Wives, but it wasn't the homes that looked the same in that movie, but the wives who began behaving like identical ideal subserviant drones after their husbands turned them into robot replicas. Perhaps the song popularized by Pete Seeger, "Little Boxes on the Hillside" is a good descriptor?

But there are a wide variety of Linden homes and they are customizable up to a point. Perhaps Trumansville is the better trope with the same scenery repeating and the controlled life, but the Moles may have a lot of repetitive tasks, they aren't actors, but contractors meeting customer requirements, a feature of proprietary software companies often absent from open source experiments.

With the Commons expertly managed by Lindens and Moles, there is relief to the eyes as to texture, land impact, and covenants specifying the removal of Christmas trees after holidays, a limit on cats, and even prohibition on the ban systems that hark back to MMORPGs in the way they return you home, to your spawn point.

To be sure, people run through 351 prims, even if the house doesn't count, pretty fast -- which is why we are about to get 2048 ranchettes! Can Bellisseria homesteads be far behind?

Freed of the stresses of the Commons Tragedy that pits neighbours against each other (remember the neighbours' gigantic submarine that brought all other scripts to a standstill or the club on 4096 of land that filled all available avatar slots for that region every night, so no one could go home not to mention infestations of glowing towers?), the Linden Homes areas are said to create better communities with richer and more rewarding events, including DJ parties, the stamp finding game, and art shows.

Yet no lot can be put in search, no commerce is allowed, even a yard sale or charity flea market, and all social life is driven to groups -- groups inevitably heavily controlled by their founders, often spawning anti-groups.

We didn't find Juneteenth on the calendar or anything like the elaborate sculptures and installations of ArtKorner's weekly HUD, but there's the Legacy Mainland for that, right? After you're done with a round of the GTFO transportation game.

For how long?

***

Act 4, Scene 3
Privacy for Me/
Bounce for Thee

This vignette doesn't need much explication.

The yellow ban lines, blocking your view.

The inadequate ban lists that are numerically limited, or overcome by some rogue viewers, or which don't work above a certain height.

The candles and crystals and wishful thinking -- door locks? Sit hack anyone?

We did have quite an ominous looking animesh bouncer guy out here but he was 17 li so we took him down.

Both the desire for privacy -- and not always for the reasons you think -- and the desire for travel and exploration are always in conflict and always spawn protest.

It's hard to believe there was a time when Philip actually said for a moment in time that he would deprecate the "teleport home" or "bounce" scripts that so aggravated life on the Mainland. Then a caucus of Lindens and old residents squawked that the 3 1/2 elevators then operating in SL very slowly and clunkily would no longer work, so the script had to stay.

Certain merchants and influencers got their way on this, especially those who sold security orbs.

The Lindens had a brainstorm a few years ago -- truly genius. They added the function "Avatars Can See Me" to the land menu which can be switched "on" or "off".

Nothing like being totally invisible from outside the lot for privacy!

Of course, by definition in a virtual world, you are in public and it is hard to take yourself out of the public eye but of course it is constantly done with a huge variety of skyboxes, security systems, and then the continent Zindra, which isn't so much the "adult content" continent as it is "the zone where your enemies can't AR you" for swearing (as they can in PG) or classical paintings with partial nudes (as they can in G) or flying around with your bits outside (as they can in M) -- which they do merely as a form of retaliation usually over other beefs.

That's all that's about.

"Privacy" encompasses not just the view of any activity or furniture or scantily clad persons, but the right to be free of encroaching trees or builds, other people's prims on your land, rooted on theirs, and even an ugly view.

So the Lindens responded to the constant flood of complaints about how ruined the view got from signs, ad farms, tall buildings, and just plain fugly beach houses and spinning neon signs by allowing the third-party viewer Firestorm to put "derender" into the viewer.

The Lindens themselves have always steadfastly held to a Shared Vision of a Shared Vision and I'm with them there -- I think you should have rules people abide by -- soft norms or hard code laws -- to make views and lives tolerable and not rely on making the world a fractured fairy tale where no one sees the same thing.

I don't know how long that notion will last with the Lindens but they've had it for 20 years, and enabled a wide variety of options to ensure users the level of privacy or interaction they wish, by choice.

Every student of the Internet's history knows the story of "A Rape in Cyberspace" -- and everyone knows that when Meta began to claim the first Metaverse, they failed to learn not only from The Well but Second Life, which made a lot of progress on enabling freedom from the company but freedom from other users, as well. Soon the headlines were filling up with the rediscovered invention of the wheel.

A movie was once made for TV, a detective thriller taking place in Second Life, in which a character shouts "Log off! Log off!" to another character to get them away from an evil influence.

Until AI has a map of your house in its mind's eye and you in it, unless you're in a place like Iran or Russia, you're safe from prying eyes in RL for now. And in SL, you have many options to protect your privacy -- so many, that the frequent lament of newbies and returnees -- it's impossible to find a friend and things to do -- may have been the result. The privacy the individual seeks soon attaches to groups of like-minded with clubs whose main purpose is to keep others out.

***

Act 5, Scene 1
The Future is NOW

Dr. Harry "Happy" Cox, who you may remember from Firesign Theater, says "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG'. And as we know from a Firesign skit, "The future is HERE, the future is NOW".

The future isn't turning out like we thought and here we all are now soaking in it.

What will YOUR future be like in SL? If you like, go to our ancient Magic Compass at the geographic and magnetic center of SL in Ross (yes, really!) and take a reading (click on the fortune cards for the LM).

Harry has a question for the big Linden town hall for the 20th birthday:

"Will chatGPT take YOUR jobs?" Some of the work of Moles and Lindens may be further automated.

And more importantly, this:

"Is all of SL a giant LLM for you to use to train AI on? Are you sitting on a gold mine?"

As I noted before, unlike the giants who inhabit Silicon Valley, LL hasn't slurped up customer data to pitch ads to customers or sell to outside ad agencies.

But could it use the petabytes of chat and content and signage and labelling as an LLM to train robots?

Would it want to? If so, what constraints would be put on it?

I predict that the next iteration of the Tao of Linden (click on the rations to get it) will have to say something about artificial versus organic intelligence and comment whether it uses customer data for anything, whether pitching ads or for "world experience" or "improving the platform" or however it may be phrases. The role of bots will have to be better defined not just in the TOS but will have to start in the mission/values statement of the Tao.

We all have a big advantage because we've all been living up in the future for 20 years and other people are just going to come and know it.

We know what it means to be banned globally from the main outposts of society. Could that pan out in RL? We know what it means when merchants ban us from their vendors on the MP and inworld for all kinds of reasons, good or bad -- maybe they believe we have Copybot; maybe they don't like our blog. What about a future when you can't buy bread because you criticized the president?

We know what it is to have houses that are networked and public and visible and cammable by everyone. Will RL get that way?

Will the best parts of SL prevail in a RL all-encompassing Metaverse, like "getting to know someone from the inside out," as a figure in one of Draxtor Dupres' videos about romance in SL so beautifully described it?

All kinds of people from all kinds of places and stations in life and perspectives sometimes come together to cooperate in SL on all kinds of things, from live music to art to breeding smart cats and keeping the view nice and sailing into the sunset. Is that extendable to RL?

The "weak ties" once celebrated as a boon of social media are never discussed any more because they too often turn so vicious. Do virtual world "weak ties" work better to create viable communities?

I find it shocking that some tech on Twitter says the Metaverse started in 2022 and points to some industry working group -- and says if some company isn't in it, they must not be relevant. They have a very cramped notion of "Metaverse" that largely revolves around interoperability for a few big platforms.

Of course there is a lot more that goes into world-making, from security, privacy, regulating commerce, ensuring creators' rights to enable a viable market, and deterring crime effectively.

Linden Lab was convening Metaverse conferences in 2003. I went to the first one in 2004 ("State of Play" conference at NYU Law School, followed by the first SLCC meet-up).

I'm old enough to remember the first white paper on the Metaverse in 2007 with Jerry Paffendorf (SnoopyBrown Zamboni in SL)

Wire magazine has an article on the Metaverse this week acknowledging the role of Second Life in shaping Roblox and VRChat. Philip Rosedale is chided for anticipating SL becoming far bigger than it has, but if it influenced other worlds -- it has indeed grown bigger. Who had adult content in Roblox on their bingo card?

Wired speaks lamely of the need to organize easy AR reports as in SL -- but we know that's not enough, not without external blogs, social media, internal forums, and resident community groups where you can discuss issues and where you can address grievances and bring about meaningful change.

As the old END anti-nuclear slogan said:

PROTEST AND SURVIVE!

If the world are to live and be places where we move and have our being, we have to care enough to protest, offer alternatives, and being willing to compromise, just as in real life.

I always have.

END

Who's Behind BonnieBots? Hint: They May Not Be Nice People

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

ostiabs, sparklespice and kristedesl lounging about their sim PetPlay with a giant Rez Day board.

So I wondered who was behind bonniebots, the grid-scraping venture that has the forums all riled. The site speaks for itself -- it is grabbing a lot of stuff that people don't feel should be amplified on the World Wide Web even if it is "public". And it's also publishing a lot of INACCURATE data.

The "Top Merchants" is based on a scrape of the "What Customers Are Buying" box on the Marketplace.

The web site makes absolutely no reference to the PEOPLE behind this, not their SL or RL names. Only the BOTS are shown with names like bonniebots95. There's a link to Lou Netizen's site, but that doesn't mean he's involved -- his site is a generic site about bots.

The Lindens don't require bots to be marked in anyway inworld, although their names and slumped posture can be giveaways -- and they really should mark them both on the profile and the map in a different colour. But for some reason not clear to us at all, the Lindens have gone full-bore pro-bot and anti-data-protection on this issue, closing thread after thread after thread after thread (last count was 4), with now a Word From Our Sponsor from Patch, who has been away from the forums for quite some time, to my mind.

Patch needs to read the threads he and his staff are closing. Bonniebots isn't so much about information WE provide; it's about information LINDEN LAB provides on its own website, about our profiles and our shopping habits and land we have abandoned or decided to visit. LL displays this; not us. They have allowed their service to be aggregated and amplified in ways that are inaccurate and misleading and it is now out of their control. They need to rein this in in the worst way.

I thought a good place to start was to go to this idiotic Rez Day board on a sim named "Petplay" (arrgggh). I don't need a board inworld that tells me my birthday -- do you? I can see it on my profile. I hate venues that grab your profile to display to show you've been there -- after first asking permission (this took a fight back in the day). I couldn't care less about my "privacy" on the Internets and I'm a very public blogger. But I don't feel I need to contribute to the profile scrape insanity which only adds lag and annoyances to a sim. Don't have those, people. Everyone hates them.

This is a GIANT version of that stupid profile-grabber, with numerous people's profiles whose rez day it happens to be -- because bots are going around and grabbing this PUBLIC info -- they didn't come on the sim. 

I clicked on the board object in "edit" to see who was the owner, as I figure that would be the bot wrangler:

Answer: sparklespice Resident with the display name "Dog", owner of a furry supplies store.

Caution: At first I couldn't be sure that he and others on site were involved, but having been in SL lo these 18 years, I have a feel for these things and I'm going to take a WAG and say: it's them. Listen further.

I marvel that no one on the forums asked this question and I seem to be the only one asking it on Twitter. Who runs this site?? It DOES NOT SAY ANYWHERE.

Come on guys, this is basic stuff. If someone scrapes all the grid's data and does -- whatever -- with it, they need to present themselves with at least their main avatars, preferably their RL contacts, explain their business. It's not enough to claim they aren't selling the data -- THAT IS NOT THE POINT.

It's not enough to say "oh, it's public". Because what's happening is that it's being AMPLIFIED AND WEAPONIZED. When THAT happens in SL, we have a right to protest. Nobody thought when they signed the TOS and read the privacy policies that their annual sales data and their raunchy profiles would go into Google and be read by RL bosses or spouses or whoever can cause havoc in an avatar's life. So let's not be children here. AGGREGATIONS and AMPLIFICATION is the issue, NOT the mere act of scraping what is there, as the odious Theresa says, for them to "put their mouths under and catch the drips."

I'm hardly surprised knowing how these capers go that "Dog" is a BDSM practitioner who favours sites where he can be put on a leash and be mistreated -- and as always, he has allowed his "lifestyle" to leach out from his private life into the public domain and held us all hostage to his bot-scraping. No thank you. Where's the "safe word," Master?

Hey, can we all focus on YOUR profile and picks, Big Guy? Sure we can!

Within seconds after landing on PetPlay, the following conversation ensued, and then I felt a giant paw on my back kicking me from the sim. I think it's safe to say these are the people behind Bonniebots -- that they are not practicing their "Be Excellent to Each Other" idiotic geek mantra on anyone who asks normal questions about their operation -- and even if they are NOT the people actually running the site and the bots, they're related. Because: Rez Day Board.

And now hilarity ensues:

[17:01] osti (ostiabs): Prokofy! I can't believe you're here. I read all your insane tweets about the Bonnies.
[17:01] Dog (sparklespice): Welcome!
[17:01] Prokofy Neva: Yeah, I was trying to see if you goofs had your main accounts anywhere
[17:01] Prokofy Neva: which you don't put on your web site
[17:01] Prokofy Neva: and my tweets are accurate, thank you
[17:01] osti (ostiabs): You're an insane motherfucker.
[17:02] osti (ostiabs): I'll say that for you.
[17:02] Dog (sparklespice): snapshots!
[17:02] Dog (sparklespice): ??
[17:02] Prokofy Neva: so gosh that doesn't sound like you're being excellent to one another!
[17:02] ღ ƇƛƧƧƖЄ ღ (kristadesl): I can give you a picture you dont have to cam on me.
[17:02] Prokofy Neva: oh well I like to get candid shots : )
[17:02] ღ ƇƛƧƧƖЄ ღ (kristadesl): Not candid when I can see you looking
[17:02] Prokofy Neva: so you took the avatar profile search down guys?
[17:03] Prokofy's New Mountain Retreat - All Welcome, Rowling (196, 253, 70):

Are these people Scottish? "Bonnies"....

That last bit means "teleported home". My current home  -- a sim riddled with Sith Obelisks -- for now -- is open to the public. 

You can read my tweets on this subject here and I don't see anything "insane" about them because I'm not yammering on about the "privacy" angle. We don't have privacy in SL or on the Internet. I have a different point to make, as I noted on the forums.  These people were neither elected or acclaimed. This is yet another grid-wide power-grab by one group which the Lindens have blessed for whatever internal business/political reasons they have. It's wrong.

It's entirely disingenuous, however to claim this is "public data" when in fact it's a context where on the Lindens' very site, it shows a profile -- but not groups and other tabs, and offers you to click on a bar and LOG IN. You have to be a registered member. Not everyone wants their avatar profile in Google's giant maw. And again, data about sales and visits and abandoned land is displayed by the Lindens, not us, in a context where we do not expect the PROXIMITY of ourselves to that data to be exposed.

Interestingly, since the break-out of the forums furor, the Avatar Search function on the Bonniebots site has been "down" for 2 days, sparking speculation that it is "removed". I don't see that it's "removed" -- they  may only be waiting for the furor to die down.

Abandoned Land

Just tootling around today to a dozen of the "abandoned land" sites, particularly on sims where I have land, I found them inaccurate. They purport to give you a SLURL to land you on abandoned land; they don't, sometimes they land on my current owned land with tenants on it, or on a Linden road, or under water. To be sure, there might be abandoned land on that sim, but then you have to hunt for it. The amount of meters is wrong in some cases; the info is outdated. I suppose that's because the map itself is not operating in real time but can be hours -- days -- behind.

I found the device mildly helpful to find some bits and bobs I had overlooked (who has the time to spend all day going 16 m by 16 m through an entire 65336 m2 sim?!) to try to pre-empt the Sith Lords or the other asses of SL with ambitions to spread their e-peens over the grid and deprive them of that glee -- before the Lindens sell them the land, which they do.

Top Spots

Looking at the "top spots," I found them to be the usual gaggle of BDSM lots and "Skilled Gaming" where it is not always possible to tell the traffic bots from the real people. I don't know why Linden Lab is encouraging this -- it's nuts. Their Destinations is curated and decent, and not only in the "G" sense -- they take you to high quality destinations with Things to Do. What Bonniebots turns up are the sinkholes of SL which will make newbies or returnees leave.

Top Merchants

The "top merchants" has people really riled up because it's misleading -- the data scrape is open on the Marketplace, but they aren't merely duplicating it. They are aggregating it and representing it as "14-day sales data" and making a Leaderboard -- of the type we had at the dawn of SL, showing who had the most Lindens and the best pos-rates as they were known. The Lindens retired that ages ago as it was a conflict vector.

Like they also ceased publishing the economic data they once were happy to roll out, like how many premiums there are etc. Bonniebots is misleading.

Inaccurate and Misleading

I'm amazing that Patch couldn't figure out with just a half hour's perusal of this site, such as I and others are making, that this site does not do LL or the SL public a service.

o The data is inaccurate for "abandoned land" -- there are better-functioning HUDS for sale on the MP

o the Top spots are adult avatar traps

o The "Top Merchants" info is misleading as sales inworld or even MP sales scientifically gathered aren't included -- the "What Customers Are Buying" is only a SAMPLE.

Anything that enables one ambitious group of people to take over the publication of economic and land statistics which the Lindens themselves decided to cease publishing years ago simply can't be "harmless" or "good". The process by which the Lindens agreed to this and then vigorously championed it on the forums, silencing even the most polite and normal questions is odd, to say the least. What's up?

And with their sassy talk and booting a reporter from the sim, these people have proven handily that they are the typical bad-faith goons we always deal with on the grid when these "grid-wide" projects are foisted on us by techies (like the pods or programs to cross sim seams).

It seems never to have occurred to these millennials that even a one-line disclaimer about the clearly PARTIAL merchants' information was in order.

Now let's come to ostiaabs, who appeared to be "the brains behind the business" and the better dressed. Is he this suspended account?

It's not a common name.

He's in the "pet adoption" business as well.

Ostiabs partner was also on site, with some RP game tag babbling over her head. Her name is: kristadesl

Out of the three loafers on the Rez Day PetPlay sim, she was the only one with an actual profile describing bonniebots -- information which "may be public" but which is NOT ON THE WEBSITE at this hour.

Note that only one of these creatures (there appear to be dozens zipping around the map) will talk to you -- and perhaps isn't a bot, after all.

While the Lindens may have talked to these honchos, we didn't know who they were until I went to look.

kristadesl also favours BDSM Pet Play. 

This Land is My Land, This Land is Not Your Land

You're welcome to form your own judgement about all the silly things on these people's profiles -- they're kids. I'm old. These people look to be younger than my own kids. I don't care what other people do IN THEIR OWN BACKYARD.

When they come into MY backyard and other people's backyard, I care.

Their style of BDSM is the sort of uneducated bubblegum inch-deep mile-wide crap that likely makes the kind of old refined masters of this "lifestyle" wince and shake their head. Of course they can do WTF they want on their land.

But they aren't on their land. They're on our land. They're on Linden land. Scraping data that is public. But then aggregating and amplifying it in ways that cause conflict, stress, misinformation, confusion, anger, forums fights, drama and all the rest.

I personally wouldn't bother to ban these creeps from my land -- they might change the account names constantly anyway. I totally get it that my "privacy" --which was shattered with the help of top FIC personas and the Lindens in the IRC and on the forums 18+ years ago -- is not at issue. I don't share Coffee Pancake's views on a great many social matters, and I don't think she or any person in her community is harmed by this as such.

I think it's more about the Lindens once again essentially awarding a franchise to their little friends. That wouldn't be so terrible if they picked good friends. They didn't here.

 

Casper Responds to My Post

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

It's always good to print someone's response/rebuttal to your post about them, although in this case, there's a glaring omission.

For all his self-justification, Casper Warden doesn't even mention at all the issue of his putting me as a "sample griefer" in all his teleporter products for a time.

He doesn't apologize for it here; he doesn't pledge to make sure it is gone when the Lindens take it over; he doesn't even mention it. That says it all!

He claims that there is nothing about his sale to the Lab because it's "in Second Life". What does that mean? The sale was for Linden dollars? That he didn't cash out?

But surely the UK tax authorities are like the US. If you cashed out to PayPal, that sum is like any other income -- payment for a translation or editing or something sold on Amazon or even my book. It all has to be reported, even if a 1099 or other tax form wasn't generated from the payment -- and PayPal itself is now going to issue 1099s. That promises to be a problem if someone paid you who already issued their own 1099. It means you will use PayPal less, especially as their fees now rival bank transfers.

But it's not my problem. My complaints to RL authorities are more along the lines of calling 311 about the terribly cracked sidewalk near my house which Hunter College, which is responsible for it, has not fixed in 10 years. Or about the war in Ukraine. Somebody else can worry about what UK businesses do -- seems to me the UK is over-active, if anything, on policing Facebook and Google.

The Lindens, desperate for cash, probably approached him because down the line, they plan to tax purchases and rentals -- any transactions -- inworld. They say they aren't doing that yet, but of course they don't rule it out and it will be sooner rather than later, as with the purchase of X-Street which led to taxation on the Marketplace eventually. 

Perhaps some software plan was going to cause something about this system to go out of order but that seems doubtful, as it's not the only pipeline of its kind. No, more likely it was an administrative chore and expense for Casper, even if it made a profit, and given that the population has flattened -- as even Daniel the Since-Teen-Grid Fanboy has reported, there isn't any future in it for him.

Yes there are always new people. Yes, there is always attrition. And it wears you away finally.

I'll remind everyone that my concern, as you can see in my previous post of our conversation, isn't about "privacy," the classic nerd concern that big companies take your information and sell you and spam you and exploit you -- you are the product even if you pay for it. No, I mentioned a completely different concern: that knowledge gained about the market from that huge firehose of purchase and rentals data would transfer into an unfair advantage in the virtual market. Of course, the "unfair advantage" was mainly gained merely by providing a service that worked well and broke down rarely, and didn't seem to have odd things happening in it or a crank for a owner as Hippo did. Still, I think my concern was valid. Casper's answer was basically "but making a profit in a market is such a complex thing you can't possibly gain an advantage just for this complex information". 

I disagree. SL is a small world. Trends show up even just looking at your own purchases or "last 5 things bought inworld".  While there isn't any evidence that Casper moonlighted on an alt as a land baron or breedables baron, he could have easily -- one things of BellaTech, which runs the ugly domes-in-the-view sky rentals and also owns events like NEXT to hustle the gatcha replacements. Therefore I think it is right to ask him about this problem -- and his answer is obfuscation.

And duh, I already said in my previous post that the Lindens already possess all this data. Except in Casper's system, it's arranged neatly and managed, and as we know, the Lindens are overwhelmed with their own game, and we can't assume they have expert, efficient analysis of their data. Just look at your own Casper page to understand what I mean -- you see the trends of what you bought, when you bought, why you bought, and that multiplied by whatever percent of the daily concurrency of 50,000 people yields valuable information about what OTHER waterfronts besides Blake are hot, or what OTHER heads besides Lelutka are gaining attention.

Notice the Lindens' purchase of Casper was then followed by the publication of a new privacy policy as they are mindful of everyone's query on this score. And again, the issue isn't that Casper or Linden are going to spam my email with ads about Persian rugs because I bought a virtual Persian rug using their system; the issue is what advantage this gives to a player in the market, and now, the government, as they can perfect their favouritism system even more.

I will comment more when I have the time. He does answer the query some on the forums had as to whether he sold the business because it was failing. I doubt that, given its near monopoly status.

XXX

 

Notecard 9/21/2022

Hi Prokofy

A few people have pointed out some of your posts on twitter and the like, and I just wanted to answer some of the questions that you've raised.

Firstly, my real-world company is not being sold, only my SL-related technologies and assets. That's why you won't see any reflection of this sale at companies house.

CasperTech (and specifically, our in-world operations) have always been profitable, and there was no sign of that changing. We achieved this by keeping costs to a minimum, with highly efficient back-end code able to handle millions of in-world devices without spending a fortune on hardware. In addition, this market sector sees a constant influx of new users, as well as high attrition. This consistent flow effectively funded the service and more than covered costs.

If there was ever a sign that we wouldn't cover costs, my first instinct would have been to switch to a subscription model rather than selling up. The sale has nothing to do with the profitability of the business.

Despite your suspicions, I am (and have always been) a friend of privacy. As an example, I'm currently working on writing a standard specification for code signing in web applications, to help to secure end-to-end encrypted web applications against malicious javascript injection from the server (many users are not even aware that this
vulnerability exists with supposed end-to-end encrypted web services). Privacy is important to me.

The data which CasperTech stores has always been kept secure and confidential, never abused, and never sold until the LL acquisition. Over the years many people have made (sometimes, very attractive) offers to buy either parts or the entirety of the business. I rejected them all, primarily because I was not convinced in their ability to continue providing the service effectively while also respecting the rights and privacy of our users.

With the LL acquisition, I am confident that they will continue the service (because it's in their interest to do so), and they were already privy to the vast majority of data that we hold, because all transactions flow through their servers as a natural result of us operating in Second Life. They were already a data processor for us.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to get in touch. I'm open to discussion with you or anyone else, let's not proliferate rumour and speculation.

(Oh, and about the "covid" mask - I'm afraid I'm just really lazy at changing my outfits, I've been wearing this
since pre-covid https://gyazo.com/969d76bc26619231e9c4fb6f52149e87 )

Kind regards

Casper

My Conversation with Casper (2015)

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

From Casper Warden's inworld avatar profile.

Linden Lab acquires CasperTech in Second Life
Learn More: https://t.co/ng3Arxyk4m#LindenLab #CasperTech #SecondLife #VirtualWorld #Metaverse pic.twitter.com/bx8lKMY4Xd

— Second Life (@SecondLife) September 14, 2022

So this is actually a very old interview from 2015 (apparently November 17, 2015) with Casper, owner of the CasperTech vendor systems which has just been acquired by Linden Lab. And as far as I recall, it came AFTER Casper put me in all his teleporters in his "sample ban list" (which I wasn't aware of at the time). Somehow I failed to publish it all this time, not through any fear of reprisal, as that actually had occurred BEFORE as far as I reconstructed at the time, although I can't be sure. That is, Casper is capable of banning someone in SL from ALL purchases from his vendor, and that's why I bother with challenging him, for the sake of the nature of the Metaverse we all get. I think it's relevant to the current debate about this latest GOMing by Linden Lab.

Dear Casper,

I have two questions about your rentals system.

The first is whether the system can be set up so that a bank of rental boxes or meters can be placed in one even small location, and refund of one won't issue a call that will refund all the others, too, i.e. are they on separate channels or can they can be configured so the script does not act upon the other boxes?

No doubt that issue is solved by being web based but it sounds like there's an option for old-fashioned inworld-based terminals as well. But I have a much more important question.

The reason I don't like web based third-party rental systems is because they give the owner of that system ENORMOUS amounts of customer information and economic information about Second Life business people -- essentially everything that used to be public knowledge before the Lindens began hiding it, i.e. number of avatars who pay more than $1 per month or $5000 per month, etc.

If all the major stores and vendors and rentals agents pipe all their transaction information into your web site, it's easy for you at the back end to harvest it all.

Then you know which stores or rentals agencies are doing well and which poorly; what the revenue is of each one; even their customer lists and granularity right down to the products that sell or don't sell. You can harvest all this not only to make economic decisions to position yourself above others in the controlled virtual market of SL; you can exploit it even more directly, for example, if you saw that the rental trends were trending toward "4096 beachfront" or "2560 snow" or "homesteads only, no private islands" or "this mesh hat not that sculpty hat" you could invest in those areas on your alts.

The other thing you'd be in a position to do is sabotage any competitors, make preferred groups of customers, etc.

I don't mean the problem of spamming with customer lists. That's crude and I don't see any evidence you do that. I mean the harvesting of customer information that other people obtain through their hard work and connections and business expense, that you can harvest merely by switching on an automated scripted object to your website. You would have more power than the Lindens, as they aren't efficient and don't have a system that runs as well as yours does especially on the Mainland.

Now, you can dismiss this question as paranoia or the obsessions of an infamous SL crank, but they aren't trivial. Some of this behavior I describe I have seen exactly in Hippo Rentals which is why I have never used them and other companies no longer in business like Gigas.

The answer can't be "I don't look at the customer and transaction information of all my clients using my products because I don't have time for that/it's not practical/it's not interesting/who needs to know about your crappy rentals/vendors."

The answer I'd expect is "Yes, that's a problem, but that's why...customers can encrypt their data on my system (not likely). Or "Yes, I can see your concerns there, that is a lot of power over a toy world and game economy, but you see, I don't misuse it and my customer base only grows. The hedges again my misuse of this power and information are.... (and here you name the hedges -- and PS, "Prokofy's Blog" can't be one of the answers, but should be.

Prokofy Neva
Owner
Ravenglass Rentals

Hi Prokofy

Thank you for your notecard. You have asked some very good questions, and ones which I believe anyone
should ask before they make an investment - not just of money, but of information.

One problem I face with answering you, however, is that you seem to have clearly dictated what you want
the answer to be, and what the answer "can't be". I don't believe this permits room for an open,
honest and pragmatic answer, and so - with respect - I will be disregarding this.

The answer to your first question is "Yes". The rental units and boxes operate independently of each other,
the channel is randomly chosen when the rental unit is touched.

Now to move on to the issue of privacy and integrity.

Firstly, and for the record, we don't perform any analysis of the information we hold, with the exception of:

- The statistics tools made available to merchants as part of the service, and..
- A monthly, normalised metric which aims to monitor the performance of Second Life as a whole,
made publicly available at https://caspervend.casperdns.com/economy.php. [This link no longer works, if it ever did, and is not archived at the Wayback Machine]. [Now this link appears to work, perhaps because I reported it not working. I don't see that it really shows  you that the economy is improving; it shows you that prices are higher, and that's related to higher cashout costs and higher tier costs. That is, it's like computers: 50 years ago, no household had to spend what amounted to the cost of a used car or some other big purchase ($1500-2000) on a communication and entertainment device; today, that cost is folded into every family budget. So people spend more now on mesh heads and bodies, and perhaps then those merchants make more money but they face increased costs. Economies are not only made up of what merchants; you have to look at the consumer basket, government subsidies, etc.]

Of course, I know that this isn't what you want to hear - you have no reason to believe me. So, I suppose the
question becomes a matter of risk assessment.

There is, naturally, a risk/benefit trade-off which always applies whenever you engage a third party service
provider. When I am evaluating a new platform in which to invest my information, I generally ask myself..

- How valuable is the information I'm giving them?
- How could the information be misused?
- What are they selling? Am *I* the product?
- Are they affiliated with any competitors of mine?
- Is there a conflict of interest?
- What recourse do I have in the event of a worst-case scenario?

The very fact that you sent me this notecard implies that you believe there is a risk to your business.
Does the potential risk outweigh the potential benefit that you would receive from the services we provide?
If so, then in your case, perhaps you should consider developing a solution in-house.

However, I would suggest that the information perhaps isn't as valuable as you believe. For a start, actually analysing
the data to achieve a competitive edge is a gargantuan task. I would need to profile each and every product
by each and every merchant using my system. I have no data on market sectors, promotion, product development,
customer opinion, etc., all of which would be pretty important for any meaningful analysis.

If I can see, for example, that your rental business is performing 20% better than company X. Or 10% worse than
company Y. Does this allow me to launch my own rental business and actually compete with you? No, not at all.
There are so many other factors involved, I don't believe this is realistic.

You're right that I could analyse market trends and "invest" in those areas. But investment alone does not make a
successful product - ESPECIALLY not in Second Life. Knowing what market sectors are popular may be beneficial, but
it's hardly a deal breaker.

Regarding harvesting customer information - having the name of a customer doesn't immediately give me a rapport
with that person, any any attempt to market to them would be blatant. The truth is, MY OWN customers hold the most
commercial value to my business. My products are targeted at creative minds, entrepreneurs, merchants, designers,
artists. Thinkers. Who could ask for a more ideal client base?

That's not to say that the information I hold couldn't be abused. Of course it could. Which is why I actively encourage
you to make your own risk assessment based on the information available.

Some factors which may be worth considering - we are a real company, CasperTech Ltd registered in the UK, and are accountable in the real world for our actions regarding data privacy. We have an excellent track record, with tens of thousands of loyal customers.

Thanks for getting in touch, and please let me know if you have any further questions.

It's certainly refreshing to see somebody who considers such issues seriously. "It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you." ;)

~Casper

P.S I would personally be interested to hear how Hippo were able to abuse the information they hold, as you claim. It seems to me that it didn't do them much good commercially.

 

As for Hippo, they had numerous scripts inside their rental boxes, which engendered a lot of mistrust that they were piping more data than they needed to be, including proximity data. Hippo was also in the land buying and renting business himself, which made it questionable as to whether he could use information to compete with his own customers.

When he was first starting out, he rented a stall from me at Ravenglass Hall on the docks. And he was a fellow land owner in Brown as I recall. And one day while searching my own listings, I saw that he ran a search ad that spouted "Raise the rent at Ravenglass with one click!". Now what the HELL was that all about? He was not just using my business name, which he already got some advantage of by being in search on my land; he was implying that I regularly hiked the rent with a flick of a switch -- which I never did. Why give MY business as an example? I mean, who DOES that? That was among a number of exposures I had to the nature of Hippo, who was universally despised for various reasons, and who was essentially put out of business by Casper who obviously studies markets THAT much.

I will write another post about what I think of Linden Lab's acquisition here. But I gathered from this conversation and other hearsay that for him, SL was small potatoes compared to his other web business(es) and that it was maybe even run at a loss, as a "proof of concept" or to "get in the door of the Metaverse early" or something like that. And here we all are.

It's curious Casper has nothing about this acquisition on his web page, nor does the UK company register have anything. Could this announcement have been hurried? Is something in the LL software going to change that will disrupt Casper and the Lindens thought the best way out of this problem was to buy the company?

 

Failed Linden Mainland Experiments Over the Years - UPDATED

Riderless pod spamming a Heterocera sim.

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Jack Linden: "thankfully there will always be a mainland. v"

The nearly 20 years of Second Life's history are replete with ambitious experiments on the geographically-contiguous Mainland, both by Lindens and residents, and I think it's safe to say many of them ended in tears because of unintended consequences ("the tragedy of the commons") or damages to this or that legitimate group interest. 

There is always the inherent problem of the Lindens' contiguous Mainland and its many discontents and support tickets, way more than the minimal Linden staff can handle, and their seeking recourse in favoured resident volunteer groups who are not particularly deserving and generally serve themselves and their friends. This ultimately causes the Lindens to disband them or cease rewarding them.

The Linden Greco-Roman style palace in Tenera is a particularly vivid example. (I have my Silva Beach community across from this build in Sylvia). It housed the 8,000-strong (!) group of selected resident volunteers, managed by Lucy Linden, who were used as volunteer mentors and translators into "foreign" languages and other chores. It was essentially abandoned as a group and this Linden left the Lab, but not before one enterprising more-equal-than-others volunteer used the advantage of the land group settings to build a home in the sky for himself and his friends, not noticeable unless you happen to scan all levels of the sky regularly as I do as a nearby landlord. It's a gorgeous build and I'm for leaving it exactly untouched and for NOT reviving any volunteer groups of this nature.

This week, the ambitious owner of Operation Mainland (operation! like a war!), Feorie Friman, rolled out yet another project, involving a "subway in the sky" or metro of TP centers across the grid to "help explore historical Linden builds." It's actually another resident who has quietly and efficiently catalogued and promoted those old builds -- Aethelwine on the forums, who is also involved in the sailing community -- but Feorie is poised to coopt all that labour now into her "Operation" and "drive traffic" to old Linden builds in the hopes that, as the now-deleted thread revealed, she will be allowed either to put her stamp game in them (so far she has been blocked as the Moles favour only the BBB) or even be allowed to "repurpose" them or help in deleting and improving others. I personally don't want to play with empire-builders who work with forced and deceitful cheer combined with blatant suck-ups to Lindens (she may have mercifully removed her off-key singing tribue to the Moles) and other powers-that-be in this small pond to buff a resume that it is hard to know where else may be used. I originally took this in better faith than I do now -- I have withdrawn all my sites from "Operation Mainland" and blocked Feorie inworld.  I note that the Lindens leave her provocative and deceitful post up about what Patch Linden allegedly said about "repurposing Linden builds" but removed all my content. I do get how it works. The only way to win the game is not to play at all.

So the "subway" follows her other ambitious projects, some of which are neglected (like the stamp game, which never got Mole love, and is now sprawling and hard to follow), and others which outright failed, like the plan to buy up and "beautify" abandoned land for $1/m, and flip it as a completed "community" for slightly more $$, which didn't work because people can do this themselves for less and with less overstuffing of landscaping to save prims. Having failed to get Mole sites in her stamp game, Feorie ambitiously bought into expensive Bay City, the urban enclave built by the Moles and populated with their best friends, whose land is among the most expensive in SL. It's not clear to me that she has been lovingly received there by Maryanne McCann and the other worthies, but like draws to like.  Aggressive persistence can pay off in SL.

In recent weeks, she and other Bellisseria royalty launched an ambitious Linden-loved NatureCon, building on her recent funding (or only management of?) the Corsica South Coast venue Glastonbelli in collaboration with Bellisseria. This may or may or may not fall into disuse -- the history of Corsica Coast South, formerly Campbell Coast, has been tortured with the usual resident high-tier woes and land baron exploitations and is now going through yet another revival (I own some small amounts of land there which I rent out and sponsor some roads there).

Feorie, who was born in 2009 and took part in some little-known building projects for more than 10 years without fame, may tire completely of SL and go back to RL or to another world more suited to her ambitions (this may take awhile to come into being). Or perhaps she will live and thrive and finally obtain that Linden/Mole love she so desperately seeks.

Fortunately for us all, the Mainland is still vast enough and untilled enough that anyone can maintain or start their projects without impingement from these aggressive management types, and that's what I and others do. I maintain my 14 or so sims' worth of land across 55 regions and do not look for Linden love and try to walk around Linden indifference or hostility. I show my appreciation to them by payment of tier which I try to cover from my small rentals business and content sales.  This is still possible; I encourage you to do this all on your own without interference as it can be hard, but very rewarding. I maintain about 3 sims worth of public land open in the SL Public Land Preserve which I believe is the oldest "nature preservation" project in SL and certainly one of the largest. 

At one level, a project like the "Sky Subway" is "useful," and can't likely aspire to grid-wide or multi-continent presence unless the owner has endless resources to buy sometimes highly overpriced land. While focused on "the community" and "historical Linden sites," it *is* on resident-owned small parcels of 128 or higher to show up in search and fit a small "subway" build. Feorie might or might not use it to advertise other aspects of her business or her commerce circle's business and non-profit projects enhancing reputation. That's how SL works and it's fine -- people need to get tier paid and need to draw people to their projects in a world with crippled search and advertising capacity.

But I think it's important to pan out and take a wider look at the history of aspiring grid-wide projects and how they impact the Mainland, and mainly for the worse. It's not merely about this or that person's project. It's about the nascent Metaverse and how that replicates. Philip Rosedale has been very vocal about what the Metaverse should not be and really alone in the wilderness of Metaversal wannabee Big IT -- and that is he is adamant that it is "not for everybody," should *not* be built on blockchain; should have capacity for collaborative builds and a contiguous nature and so on.

I think he himself could focus more on inworld governance and democracy. His own world is replete of examples, some of his making, of the "tragedy of the commons" which isn't just about one person's sheep eating all the grass on the commons but about the nature of the commons itself and how it is governed. It is not merely about commercial interests but the interests of non-commercial reputational enhancement such as to gain recognition and social control in a closed society.

Here is some history.

Generally, the Lindens' formula seems to have been in the last 4 years to throw up their hands at the ills of the Mainland, some of which came from conflict vectors they themselves created, and to drive customers to Bellisseria, their zoned and managed communities with limited types of housing and landscaping and prims. Then, seeing they needed to still get reluctant Mainlanders to take the plunge to Belli if they had premium accounts (or not), they devised the BBB (Bellisseria Bureaucratic Bureaucracy) "Embassy" system, the stamp game, and NatureCon and "friendship" between their legacy customers on the Mainland and their more-resourced "Game of Homes" players in Bellisseria, and encourage more premium accounts and "exploration of the Mainland" as "things to do" is the perennial problem of all Metaversal engineers.

While these all have their pluses, they have decided minuses in that they funnel Mainland traffic to a select few groups and ignore or avidly block others, and they tend to turn the Mainland into a safari, where you make short, safe trips to culled and vetted locations in the hands of a few, and where land, if it is to be bought, is to be managed closely by select groups with restricted activities. 

But some of us do live here.  And not all of us want to stand by the roadside trying to sell our beads and glazed pottery and posing with tourists.

So let me cite some of these historical experiences over the years, not necessarily in chronological order and see if better proposals and outcomes could be sought.

o The Lindens created a "dwell" system whereby visits to people's original venues acquired points which then converted into actual monetary value in the awarding of Linden dollars, convertible to real cash. This quickly became gamed so that the most popular clubs, not necessarily the most beautiful, artistic builds, got the "dwell". On group land, the dwell could either be distributed equally to all members or accrue only to officers. Islands did not yet exist, so this was about the Mainland, and when they did come into existence, few afforded them, so it remained a primarily Mainland experience. The Lindens retired this system when they realized they weren't sponsoring art and education but wet t-shirt contests.

o The Lindens created a reputational point system with plus- or minus-ratings of points in categories like "appearance" and "building skills" which then eventually degenerated into popularity contests where people even paid for the points or held events and point parties where they could collect more points. Neg-rating became a form of griefing. The Lindens first nerfed, then removed the system.

o Now here's where it gets more interesting. The Lindens permitted a Features Voting System separate from the JIRA in which anyone could write in plain text a proposal for addition of features to SL or venues. So these ranged from "a pony in the welcome area," the famous meme directed at Lindens to "give the residents everything they want", to sandboxes or roads in continents where they were missing. This was beneficial and interesting but began to get sprawling and develop duplicates. People could still hold voting parties and even pay for votes, as they pay for "Picks," but the system was big enough to be self-correcting and not reward such gaming (the way the original Bitcoin was supposed to work). Eventually one empire-builder enamored with Capture Roleplay sites named Angel Fluffy (!) decided to take over the system.  Concerted tyrannical forces always appear in virtual worlds to make the Internet be what they want, under their dominion.

So he scripted his own system to scrape the feature voting pages and volunteered to "get rid of duplicates," creating lists for busy Lindens that they were grateful to receive. On the way, he simply removed proposals he didn't like, or as on the JIRA, felt the Lindens "couldn't do," thereby sparking a lot of dissent. The Lindens nevertheless let him "clean up" this sprawling Feature Voting System which they couldn't devote staff time to do. When some groups of people saw how one resident was allowed to change and destroy one system and saw their favourite proposals missing, and began loudly protesting, the Lindens got tired of the forums drama and one day Torley Linden simply deleted the entire system, not even allowing an archive.

 The Lindens created the telehub system, based on Philips admiration of famous urban planner Jane Jacobs. These functioned as planned to enable exploration and shopping and expansion of residences across the grid, but also became highly valued adjacent real estate selling for a fortune on the open auctions, so that only two large mall builders (Anshe Chung and Blue) began to win every high-priced auction because they had the investment of venture capitalists or their own resources. Rentals at these malls were also high priced, yet they democratized the oldbie guild system of stores very far from telehubs (which is why they vehemently protested them), in which older players would give newer creators a corner in their store until they got on their feet sufficiently to buy land themselves and attract visitors.

o Facing protest particularly from oldbies in older locations on the grid about lack of traffic to their stores, usually cloaked as concert about malls as avatar traps and builds that were laggy and hard to get around in, the Lindens built a whole new series of telehubs providing more access at least on new continents, which were more bucolic, with 4096 m2 of grassland or waterfalls instead of concrete around them. They built things like the Juice Bar in Brownlee. As fast as the Lindens could build these, the same two land barons and perhaps a handful of newer ones bought up this land.

o The Lindens sponsored a contest to win a sim without purchase price (then $1500 for islands and more for good Mainland auctioned sims) but with ongoing tier costs (also higher then). Very few residents responded, because of the high recurring fee. The famous "socialism on one sim" experiment of Neufreistadt was launched, as well as an experimental game sim whose owner then got fed up with the limitations of SL's code and performance. The socialism culminated in terrorism by one oldbie who destroyed all her builds made on the sims -- communes in this controlled world often end this way as I can attest to from personal experience -- but the group re-organized and has what is claimed as the "oldest democracy" in SL, although Luskwood is a democracy of sorts, too, and if democracy needs an adjective like "socialist" which is even hidden in this case, you can guess it's not too democratic. One of its other short-lived members more on the right-wing sidse also stirred up havoc on the forums and JIRA before leaving SL.

o The Lindens sponsored a building contest to build their inworld office by Waterhead, won by Adam Zaius' group, not surprisingly. It's one of the builds that other oldbies now itch to remove or refurbish and is no longer used.

o The Lindens promoted the SLRR and various rail enthusiast groups were born, notably the Virtual Rail Consortium in Tuliptree. I had the idea to have a building contest for a mall or park or other public property along the borders of the SLRR to encourage its use. When I publicized the contest on the forums and inworld, it was horribly griefed by people wishing to discourage any "realistic" or "business" use of SL in any way. While the Woodbury griefers and 4chan types were among them, I think there were Linden alts among them. Nevertheless one Linden (Garth Fairchang, who died in RL) gave me a model train to use in promotion. I persisted with the contest, but in the end I had to drop the "railroad" concept and awarded the build to Aliasi Stonebender who created Solar Plaza in Hartwick, and supported a resident-made railroad through 4 sims for a time. 

Meanwhile, the Lindens coopted my idea and sponsored their own contest to build railroad stations along their route, for which they would donate the land (in my plan, residents would tier their own land, but Lindens will forego income rather than let go of their favourites, through whom they hope to rule their empire, like Russians through Central Asians). Some of the most interesting historical builds resulted, such as the train station by Fallingwater Cellardoor in Neumogen.

o Another resident-made railway got a lot of Linden support and support from me in the form of donated land and through passage through rentals land. Nevertheless, this resident blighted the view with huge pillars and overpasses, forcing move-outs and abandonment, and then left SL himself, abandoning all his hard-won land. The Lindens grabbed it and dubbed it "Linden Right of Way," but never built anything on it. For a time, a clack of furry RR fans badgered me to give up land to put another railroad through, and urged the Lindens to re-start their railroad. Michael Linden appeared to mark the "Linden Right of Way" in Grote, but then not long after, was let go from Linden Lab (which was a shame, as he was a leader of the Moles and a long-time and experienced Linden). The furry caucus ranted that Lindens "sold me land" (they didn't; they auctioned some of their own protected land and a flipper bought it, and I bought it from him). To date, the "Linden Right of Way" remains fallow.

o The Lindens originally had two zoned sims, Brown and Boardman, where a 512 could sell for US $100 on the auctions, it was astounding. The same people who were in TSO's old Sim Arts, of which I was a member, Ingrid Ingersoll and Barnsworth Anubis and some others decided to "beautify" these sims and built a lot of Craftsmen-type houses to fit the suburban tree-lined streets. They began a campaign to get Jack Linden to tear down the old, dead palm trees (he removed a lot but not all of them) and re-build the marketplace to be less ugly (it now has wooden stalls that are passable) but he left a few odd old Linden things like Ryan Linden's very early prefab home which is more like a stall than a home you can move around in. The strange SL logo hand that came looming up at you from every mailbox on the properties was removed. It never really looked THAT great and its curious persistence in selling for high amounts doesn't seem justified, given that Brown is General and rents poorly. The Lindens ceased to police a rule they had there that skyboxes could not be put up in the sky (it's General) and never policed much the rule that commerce could only go in the MP area.

o The Lindens built another zoned area called Schermerhorn which also had houses to provide it a better look but residents bought the land and returned them, as they always do. This area was wildly popular and then suddenly wasn't, maybe when Linden Homes were built. The same thing happened at the sci-fi themed adult continent of Horizons, which sells for a fortune and has easements, beaches, and roads that help it look better, and even a "something to do" Linden-made game in the middle, but it has little use. Linden zoning efforts basically failed until Bellisseria, where Moles finally got the right mixture of house styles, easements, and better looking landscaping than in the original Linden Library -- and forced residents to keep homes good-looking by not allowing them to return them, although supply a half dozen or so styles in each theme to chose from.

o The Lindens retained the traffic system from the old "dwell" program, although they retired their leaderboard of the "most popular venues" as these were gamed with "camping" and other rewards system. But at a certain point they modified search to be more random and contain other algorithms not based on raw visitor numbers so that search would be "more fair". Then they began slowly to break search in many ways by incorporating Google Service Appliance. As fast as Lindens changed search, residents would develop new ways to game it and still do.

o The Lindens created a "First Land" system whereby only newbies of X age could buy 512 m2 of land to get started in SL at $1/m. They made postage stamp sheets of this land on new sims, which then quickly filled up with untended plywood and ugly builds. They tried to scatter them around more, but oldbies created alts and bought them. Soon land barons could see the advantage in making a lot of new accounts and scanning sims to buy First Land and flip it, sparking anger and protest on the forums. The Lindens tried cracking down on this, in part with their rule (which they say still applies) of "five accounts only" presumably on one credit card.

o The Lindens rolled out a map in which Anshe and other more alert land barons could see a PTP system was in the making, so they bought up telehub land and this time sold it, rather than renting it. Unaware players, thrilled with land going for sale which had previously been out of reach, bit hard. When the Lindens announced PTP and the impending removal of the telehubs, land barons, especially the bilked newbie barons protested loudly and threatened a "bait and switch" lawsuit as the auctions continued right up to the announcement, despite the plan. The Lindens offered a compensation of $7/m for all telehub land, or the prospect of entering the program for resident-run infohubs. The Lindens then rolled out new sandy coastal mainland, forcing Anshe and other land barons to now spend all the Lindens with which they had been compensated on that new desirable waterfront area, or lose business. The Lindens always win. It's their game. 

o  In the early days, the Lindens allowed 16 m2 parcels by -- imagine this! -- allowing all abandoned land to disintegrate into numerous 16-m parcels. The theory was that people on that sim would come and take only what they needed for a few extra prims. Instead, such land was abought by ad farmers and ads were placed all over, sometimes in the middle of pristine waterfront. Extortionist prices were put on the land forcing people to "buy back the view". One enterprising fellow put "Impeach Bush!" billboards on the extortion-sale land, figuring that liberal Lindens and many residents would not successfully complain about them and get action. Another less "idealistic" ad farmer just put a big happy face on his billboards. New continents began to sell far less on the auctions (back when entire sims were auctioned) because their views were so quickly despoiled. Land owners lobbied for four long years for the Lindens to develop an "ad farm" policy, which they eventually did, although it is unevenly applied today and certain seemingly non-commercial things like obelisks infest the grid even more.

o When the Lindens created the brand-new, pristine "nature" continent (then) of Heterocera, the Moth Continent with builds from the Magellan legend and the famous Moth Temple in Iris, they placed NO telehubs. You could not teleport there by any means and had to fly long distances -- which in those days was difficult across the void sims where sometimes your computer would jam or crash. Players with more expensive rigs would jeer at us newbs who needed "flying lessons". A few enterprising residents such as one on an old "colour" sim with an airplane system and another with a boat on the shore charged to haul residents to the new desirable continent. Some created "log-in lots" such as myself and charged low rents for them so that you could log right in to that continent. But without telehub transportation, sales and commerce languished. 

Forums "nature lovers" complained bitterly about teleport lag and commerce blight and land barons and urged the transportation systems not to be installed. The Lindens went all out, putting Linden trees and grass on Heterocera plots that did not count on your prim count. We were all hurtling toward "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" with computer drives turning into spinning flowers, when finally, a group of land dealers who had bought the land on the auctions informed the Lindens that they would dump the land and/or cease buying new land on the auctions -- those paying Linden's bills for this new continent -- if they didn't stop listening to the forums hippie caucus, made up of people who didn't own land in the area. They relented and put in about 4 telehubs only at first -- it turned out that all you needed for a telehub was an invisible prim disc, just like those made for landings on private islands, and you could put any build around it, it didn't have to be those squat brown urban uglies of the earlier era. So they put them within the Moth Temple or at Hyles Swamp. Eventually they added more as they realized "nature" wasn't selling -- people value "nature" tiered by Lindens or other residents but don't want to pay for it.

o Before there were scripted bot avatars, land barons bought up ad farms and deployed scripted boxes to scrape land-for-sale data and therefore get on top of the deals quickly -- then remain at the top of the land-for-sale list by flipping land they grabbed which had been put to sale for fire-sale prices or abandoned (whereupon they would request it). The Lindens eventually banned land bots, and some of these land flippers went out of business, but scripted boxes evidently used for land scanning (although who knows) still persist in many places.

o In the old auction system, all persons who bid on the land, as well as the winner, was visible, and therefore residents could see which land barons were deliberately bidding up prices to keep land prices in general high, and avoid them, and also see which land barons bought up smaller pieces of isolated land on sims to put extortionate prices on them to force people desperate for prims to buy them. Eventually the Lindens changed to a new auction system, based on e-bay (a founding investor of SL was Pierre Omidyar, the e-bay guy), that showed no names at all after the bid although they do briefly leave up a record of the sales so those patient enough could fly around and observe what's happening. It's still a system only a few land barons control. An effort to create resident-based auctions to try to defeat this rent-seeking failed, in part because of land barons disguised as ordinary end users as alts, and buyer's remorse leading to drama and further abandonment.

o The Lindens permitted two driverless vehicle systems, enabling the scripters to send vehicles of various kinds over the grid at will. One of them enabled some of these cars on Linden land to be purchasable, a violation of the TOS, and they also tended to crash and pile-up on other people's land. That person had most of their accounts banned. The other person was more discreet and the cars crashed less and was rewarded with selection of the system also for Linden-run events like SLB. Still, the Lindens didn't permit these driverless simplistic "pods" to spam up Bellisseria, likely because residents there wouldn't tolerate them. On the Mainland, they spam every 15 minutes and nearly 100% of them are empty. Polls I have done whether larger or smaller show significant percentages of residents oppose or don't even know about the pods, which is denied by their supporters.

o A resident concerned about the failure of vehicles at region crossings proposed a system whereby the BDSM viewer called RLV would be used to pick up residents and forcibly cross them at sim seams. This was rejected even by RLV users and the Lindens didn't adopt it, but continued to encourage grid-wide monitoring and proposals for vehicle crossings.

o The Lindens permitted a Grid Survey which used bots to scrape information on new islands, demise of old islands, and percentage of Linden and resident ownership on the Mainland. This was widely accepted as useful and interesting, but the owner faced problems both of a bot nature and of RL time needed for such a project to be constantly updated.

o Surveying the Mainland wreckage they had wrought, while paying their server and other bills, and noting that the revenue was so far less than from islands or even content sales on the MP, yet sucked up the lion's share of customer service time, the Lindens finally decided to build Linden Homes and give the residents what they wanted -- nice homes with predictable landscaping and the view never getting ruined in the commons by neighbours or barons, with plenty of roads and waterways (which are entirely missing on some newer continents, laid out hurriedly by Lindens for quick sales even as past continents filled with blight). This "Linden-Assisted Living," as it was dubbed, didn't really take off until the Lindens made bigger homes with even prettier landscaping in Bellisseria, then Fantasseria and Sakurasseria. 

o Enter the BBB, a resident created RP group aspiring to be the bureaucracy that ran municipal services in Bellisseria which was then blessed to run various public events on Linden land and an exploration system with the stamp game, which included Mole or Linden builds, some new and expressly built for stamps, and some old, to which they were added. Alone among residents, this group now has a home on a 4096 m2 parcel with 936 prims and two rez areas surrounded by water, unlike ordinary mortals with only 1024 and 351 prims, often island. No commerce is permitted as this is banned in Bellisseria -- although very active groups expressly targeting Bellisseria events have enterprisingly figured out that the way to sales through Bellisseria is to create groups and events where freebies are distributed, and then spam people with sales IMs later. The stamps had to be vetted and accepted and a kiosk issued on a discretionary basis, which meant that the appearance of new locations was slower and more controlled. A second resident group appeared (Operation Mainland) with a more democratic system whereby essentially anyone could register and upload a stamp site and provide gifts, with stamps allowed at commercial sites. This quickly acquired many more sites and traffic but wasn't tended as well, had uneven quality especially on commercially-driven sites, and could be hard to navigate if you aren't facile at Google Docs.

o The Lindens endorsed NatureCon, an ambitious event to bring together all nature recreational/explorational groups mainly from the BBB and related circles with LDPW endorsement and participation and a system for build applications and booths which remained closed and at the discretion of the organizers. This event, coupled with the BBB stamp game, places an emphasis on "Bellisseria as premium account ownership for residences, Mainland as exploration and recreation," while steering it away from  Mainland *residences* -- which spawns the need for more customer service and unleashes protests about the blight induced by ad farms and grid-wide would-be monopolists. If you only temporarily visit the Mainland on a controlled tier, what's to complain about? 

o The Lindens tolerated the Get the Freight Out game (founded in 2016) which has deployed miles and miles of concrete trucking terminals across the grid, causing those nearby not to buy or to move out. There isn't any perceptible link between GTFO and LL -- possibly they aren't compliant enough -- and they do not appear to have been "blessed," but let's just say that unlike the breedables space, where there are plenty of other breedable companies besides KittyCats and Teegle horses, there aren't any other transportation games that have ever gotten started. Yes, this seemingly "free game" in which the players tier the land their huge concrete monsters are built on, does have a HUD and add-ons you have to buy to play. GTFO often appears with big ad billboards and near ad farms, and that precise relationship has been documented in some cases with GTFO management but also remains unclear.

For months on end, due to the Virtual Railroads Consortium leader Qie reselling some 16ms I had in fact given to him back in the day to GTFO operatives, I had a giant ugly ad billboard in the middle of the sim next to my rentals. So I built a brick wall on it. Another VCR operative put a "night watchman" with a chair on another 16m2 roadside and kept returning the (invisible) prim on a build of one of my tenants, mystifying him. I finally got Qie who I had always respected and found helpful to stop the specious prim returns, whatever their "encroachment," but the GTFO took a lot longer to get off the sim. It was most definitely the billboard of a GTFO owner, not leader, whose land was right next to their headquarters. There has been a changing cast of characters owning GTFO over the years, and one of the current owners and operators, Famous Dismantled, a fae, claims she is conccerned about 16m2 blight on the old Teen Grid (evidently she means the Sith obelisks -- agreed). 

I also dealt with a witless booster of GTFO on the forums claiming that only "some" of the builds are warehouses when anyone can see with their two eyes all over the grid that MOST of the builds in this FREIGHT game are WAREHOUSES with acres of concrete. The fact that a few farmhouses or parks or whatever are mixed in to claim otherwise doesn't cut it. Again, I'm all for having "things to do" and I don't complain where I haven't bought the view. In Adscita, until I had to deal with Winning Witte's machinations, I turned my back to a GIANT and LAGGY GTFO hulking over the lake there and put out rentals which I ran for a few years more or less happily. But it is a buzz kill. That 2000 regular players in the group get to despoil the view and drive away residential lots for numerous sims across the grid is a key example of "tragedy of the commons". Long ago, the Lindens could have made zoned areas -- beach, urban, mountain, country, off-beat -- as The Sims Online did with naming categories of sims. Then GTFO could go on the urban sim along with all those giant tall buildings that ruined the value of Nautilus in its early days and forced me and tenants out after laying out $50,000 Lindens on the auction for a 1024.  Of course they didn't have the staff for policing zoning, and weren't content to leaving it to the Gladys Kravitz's of SL to AR. Then came Bellisseria, where zoning is built in.

I will likely think up more, and so can you, but you can see the patterns. Monopolists aspiring either to crude money-making schemes -- or more typically, more sophisticated reputation-enhancement schemes that lead to social influence and power -- get the Lindens' ear (within the staff, among residents-turned-Lindens, or residents chosen by Lindens for that "successful failure" combination of "competence but compliance."

Fortunately, entire swathes of Mainland (not to mention the bulk of the grid, private islands) remain out of the reach of the Monopolists and the Influencers, especially in the non-English speaking world, and there are still wild and untilled vistas where you can build your dream. For how long?

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Most Insincere Form of Flattery: The BBB Steals My Idea of Honorary Consul

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

From my "Honourary Consulate of Titania" installation at the Home & Garden Expo Design Contest in SL in 2019. 

Shorter-than-your hand summary: the Bellisserian FIC did in fact steal my idea of honorary ambassadors (here's the proof below) but it doesn't matter because it's not copyrighted. I called it "honorary consul" in my inworld story because that's more the proper term in my view;  but let's be thankful at least the residents in this RP aren't all Americans, many of whom actually acquired in our virtual world their first experience of something called a "passport" -- and can't find RL countries on maps. At least some of the BBB aren't Americans and have some grasp of international affairs -- I think -- such as to work up models for government and foreign policy to replicate in virtuality (shudder).

I don't want to be one of those people because I'm my own ambassador of my own projects, and so should you be. I think there are better ways to sell premium accounts -- which ultimately is the purpose of this strange RP of a RL government and foreign office. But likely it will be mainly harmless and eventually sink of its own weight. It's worth following so they don't start trampling in your back yard. But remember, there is only one way to stop an exercise in player government engineered by the game company: make your own, and displace it. 

 

Slamming Operation Mainland

So Jezebel Bailey is "no long with" the BBB, and yet the august personages at the BBB still saw fit to leave her permissions on to the comms. I personally wouldn't do that if someone left my business or project, but ok. So Jezebel got on the horn the other day in the BBB Users Group (population 567) and ragged on the Forever Tourist program of Operation Mainland (population 699). I have my differences with OpMainland but generally I think they're a good thing, like I think the BBB passports and travel are a good thing. I'm all for exploring, especially the Mainland. I personally am a solo player and have my own small group Mainland Appreciation Society (population 44), and larger, long-time project, SL Public Land Preserve (population 850, of which about 650 have logged on in the last year), which has many supporters, but I'm not really here to be in the virtual equivalent of my high school government or college newspaper editorial board; for one thing, I don't have the stamina to sit for 12 hours or more a week in interminable play-meetings where nobody pays me.

Just for the record, because you can't find these things out unless you 1) own property in Bellisseria and therefore are eligible to 2) get a BBB passport and 3) get invited into the BBB Users Group if you apply for to host stamp in the passport game, here's Jezebel's note verbale to Operation Mainland:

Just wanted to put in my 2 cents because you can never totally leave the BBB when you love and believe in it as much as I do! The BBB is expanding as it has to to keep everyone happy and enjoying their passports! Just know this, the BBB is accepted and has the LL backing. You will never, ever get sent to a sex club, a shopping mall, or any place not authorized by both the BBB and LL. The BBB offers unique stamps for your enjoyment and fun in finding them in hunts, or from the weekly list that Sun puts out,
Every placement of a dispenser is carefully selected by the owner of the dispenser. No you do not make your own stamps for anywhere you happen to go to. But if you want or think a stamp dispenser could be placed somewhere, either mainland or Belli, drop a not to Sun.
The reason for this little tirade other than saying HI, is because someone thought they might be considered disloyal for going to another site. I didn't know what they were talking about. I thought they were talking about the expansion of the BBB to mainland. So here is what I think!

1. The BBB works with the moles and lindens on placement, both in Mainland and the BBB.
2. You have the most incredibly talented people working almost 24/7 on making sure everyone who is a part of the BBB, enjoy being part of our BBB group,
3. You cannot be disloyal. Just remember WE do not show places on our web page that have not passed all requirements to hold one of our dispensers.
4. If you want a travel list for us, we do not take the our list off of the places search engine. That everyone can access.
5. I LOVE THE BBB AND WHAT WE HAVE ALL CONTRIBUTED TO ITS GROWTH. Also, the moles and Lindens that have assisted with its growth.

With all this dribble passed on to you, my friends, its a free to you, game within a game that keeps on growing. Thank you all for your continued support! (do I sound like a politician yet?)

Safe travels!
Bel

Now, OpMain may have a blog where this is posted, but I only know that it is issued in the group, which I will join now to fetch and leave, because I don't want to be in groups that are like my own groups, I have enough to do. Oh, except the link in the group is no good. Ok, hmm....After clicking like an idiot for 15 minutes I finally found it -- they really need to put "BLOG" on the splash page so that you don't hunt until you find it under "location list" which isn't intuitive at all.

Again, for the record, here is Fionie's Memorandum:

Because I genuinely want to help residents travel the grid, please understand that there should never be any ‘feelings of disloyalty’ for having any kiosk from any other participating passport program. It honestly doesn’t matter to me HOW a resident finds a cool place to visit - just that they do. For location owners, I want you to do everything you can to promote your SecondLife businesses and locations - if that means having every possible kiosk of every type of game on your land, I encourage you to do so! 

Forever Tourist was never created to upset anyone - it was designed to include businesses in a passport style game AND to create community by allowing ANY resident to be able to instantly participate. If you want to understand the specifics of why I created Forever Tourist, I did an in depth video talking about it’s design, what my goals were, and the steps I took to start the process. You can watch it here. 

I have been and will continue to work with the LDPW team to try and find a way to make it easier to grab a stamp on some of these public places by placing a Forever Tourist kiosk. I only want to do this if that means we don’t have to change the rules that we have in place to let everyone participate. I haven’t been able to create a way for this to happen just yet, but conversations have happened with ‘the powers that be’. Don’t worry - I won’t give up. 

(For those who want to deepen their foreign ministry RP, here's a list of terms from the State Department you need to learn.)

It's been interesting to me to see how people who try to suck up to get along with the Lindens and deal with them in partnerships then get burned, jaded, cynical, etc. It's partly because nobody knows history; they ought to read about Clubside Granville.

The old forums archive are a rich depository of history and more people should mine it before the Lindens some day delete it, like they did the townhall transcripts. Oh, the reason I'm not in that thread is because at that particular period in history I was banned from the forums.

In any event, Operational Mainland took the higher road and made a statement setting the record straight about Jezebel's jab -- which I guess was motivated by the fact that somehow within their circles, some people thought getting involved in OpMainland meant "disloyalty" to the BBB (or visa versa). Interestingly, while this was playing out, OpMainland was featured in Destinations and constantly on the splash screen, so at some level, Lindens "want to be fair" and recognize any resident group "doing something positive". Some people are on their own planet or don't want the kiss of death or live in bitter rejection but I've always found that if you want a sustainable project where you are free and not co-opted, you have to play SL without the Lindens as much as you possibly can, given that you still rely on them for things like roads, clean water, and hospitals. Wait, I mean, just the first thing, the roads. Oh, but not in Corsica, where -- oh, never mind.

The FIC is Not a Conspiracy, It's a Report

Fionie Frimon wants to be a Mole, i.e. one of the select contractors of LL with the last name Mole which involves certain privileges but also involves enormous amounts of hard work, especially as they are now tasked not only to build roads and houses, but to be sort of Gentils Organisateurs like Club Med and organize "fun," moderate the forums, and help build community centers launched with two residents' wedding, at which Patch Linden will be best man. That last bit has raised more than one eyebrow among oldbies and several acknowledging, "Hey, Prok, you were right about the FIC."

The FIC (the Feted Inner Core or privileged caste of SL with connections to the Lindens) is not a conspiracy. It's a report. (Read the original thread about the origin of this term.) My critique about the FIC isn't rooted in jealousy because I'm "not a coder or a maker"; I just think there should be demonstrable quality and there isn't always. I think there should be activities that involve a registrational approach -- a set of criteria for a contest or an event, which anyone can apply to and participate in, rather than a discretionary approach -- where you apply, hope you meet the criteria, which can be arbitrarily applied, and then get rejected for reasons that are unknown. In the US, anyone can form a corporation by sending a small fee to an office in Delaware. It's only later, if you fall afoul of the law or don't file taxes, that bureaucrats then focus on you and restrict your activities. In Russia, the theory is the opposite: first, you take an applicant and drag him through 14 offices and grill him and  put him under the scrutiny of everybody from the secret police to the cleaning lady. Then you issue the registration or permit -- but it's on sufferance, if you stop  doing favours for the bureaucrat. Well, different countries have different cultures...

Also I think any FICness should be publicized. I don't know this lovely couple; I personally couldn't marry a man named "Riot Hax" but that's just me. I've sure he's a lovely fellow. My further comments are here. PS no need to put me in the ban list as a) I don't have a tuxedo and while I have a wonderful petite avatar from Fallen Gods, I don't like getting stepped on in big crowds. I'll wait to see the community center after all this lag inducement is over and hopefully there will be freebies.

I imagine -- I hope? -- that this initiative didn't come from the Lindens, but came from the betrothed residents (unless, of course, one or both of them are Lindens themselves lol). And I imagine that the Lindens, keen to build up Bellisseria and get some traction for their new community center in Fantisseria (and more sales) -- especially after the rather botched Trick or Treat pumpkin thing -- decided to accept the request and justify it by publicizing it on the forums so "anyone" can come (if they follow all those elaborate instructions and can fit on a sim meant for 44 people) and say that it's really about opening a civic center "anyone" can use (if they are premium and in Belli, of course).

There Can Only Be One

So Fionie has built her own very ambitious program, populated it and rolled it out successfully, while also managing an abandoned land reclamation business and doing her own building and writing and of course managing her RL jobs and family. But from what I gather, the Lindens -- the Moles -- have not granted her the recognition of having Mole locations within her network, unless she joins the BBB -- merges with them, really, only as a Mainland "honorary consulate" in a sense -- which she doesn't want to do. She is still "in talks" -- just like Bill Burns is now in Moscow with the Russians.

I think for her, the problem with joining the already-blessed BBB-Linden alliance is that you weren't there at the formation, and you will play second fiddle and if anything, hurdles will be devised to make sure you don't disrupt the program by actually joining. I suppose OpMainland can always issue stamps "on the fly" by merely going to a Mole location and issuing one but you know? Through their "DIY Kiosk" system. If I get time, I will try to figure this out and do it for Magellan's Crash in Columbia.  There are a lot of places in SL. You don't need the Mole places to have fun -- and you can have fun visiting them without all the stamp stuff.  "Don't burn down Party committees; build your own." (Jacek Kuron, Solidarnosc).

The Lindens are guided by a concept that they can't cater to "all these groups" (even though there aren't many of them; it's actually a small world; and only a few would pass muster given their usually strict and arbitrary and not always  public criteria, as with the newbie gateway helping centers. I'm not sure the BBB is so wild about such a merger either, but I personally have put stamp machines in both; I travel on both and enjoy the sites, and I don't want to get too deeply into it because I sense it will involve long waits at drafty aerodromes at high elevations without visible rentomatics, waiting for Rick to bring the letter of transit, and sadly concluding "We'll always have Ahern."

The template, of course, is the sailors and Blake.  Read history, please people. And, fast-forwarding from that post in 2009 to 2021, I think I don't have to argue any more (as I used to have to do) that such amalgations that "cross the blood/brain barrier" are about commerce, first and foremost. Sailing brought the Lindens more business, and why not? That's a good thing. It brought the "Lindesidents" in their Linden/resident "Sea of FIC" group WINDFALLS in rentals and sales of land around Blake -- that can't be argued. Was that a good thing? No, because it helped create havens for monopolists charging outrageous prices and in fact suppressing participation in SL. Are there ways to play SL without getting caught up in all this? Yes, just like you don't have to get into the best parties in the Hamptons to have fun. Will the Lindens drop their FICing to ultimately get more sign-ups? No. Not only does Silicon Valley not work that way, high school didn't, either.

What is an Honorary Ambassador?

In any event, that skirmish was last week's news, and now there's today's news, which is the BBB has now formally stolen my idea of "Honourary Consuls", which was part of a story I started in 2019, and which is manifested at a BBB stamp location called "Honorary Consul of Titania". (The "us" is European/Canadian spelling I got used to long ago going to university in Canada and Russia and working for European outfits, but if you don't have enough space, like on a limited stamp template, you drop it). I could start a long explanation about how "Honorary Ambassador" is really a different thing in the UN or OSCE or other multilateral institutional context, like with Wonder Woman. Graham Greene wrote a novel about the other kind of figure, the Honorary Consul. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, you can do what you want in SL and mangle world culture in any direction, who cares.

The "Honorary Ambassador," Bellisseria edition frankly sounds like it is modeled after the Soviet Friendship Society's latest incarnation in modern Russia, Rossotrudnichestvo which is basically the arm of the Russian state that goes out and runs influence ops abroad to recruit assets.

How to explain this for the young? Well, no one has yet proved Michael Cohen was in Prague (but keep in mind that unlike the Bear Castle, where your BBB stamp would prove you were there, and you would need another BBB stamp to prove you were at Eulennest -- Michael Cohen could have gotten a stamp in Italy and flown to Prague and it wouldn't show up) I did find that the then-rep of Rossotrudnichestvo who shows up in the Steele memo did not tell the full truth about his own trips to Prague.

ANYWAY of course the SL version of this is basically just about the Lindens having some trusted comrades who can go and rope in other residents' groups and bring them under control association with Linden projects. Nothing sinister in that! If it leads to rentals/land sales down the road, keep in mind you have to work nights and weekends getting even a Blake Sea business launched -- do you all realize that?

And from their perspective, this kind of roping in is necessary. I was the one saying the other day that the Lindens don't have the equivalent of the one-way propaganda stream Radio Tochka (a rather abominable thing in Belarus which you can't turn off) to beam messages to all or at least some select residents, since people don't read the forums, bat away splash screen announcements, and don't read emails with the word "spooktacular" in the header. You know? So that's all good, again, from their perspective. We're not going to wait for Committees of Correspondence to be formed on every sim or even every continent to deal with the Lindens now, are we.

Honorary Consulate of Titania

I've run this story of Titania and its hapless Honorary Consul M. Carter Blanc of Telehub Ross (as in carte blanche, get it?) for some time now in various forms. It lasted through over 3 years of the Home & Garden Expo design contest participation where I won prizes for "best story"; it then had various sequels on my blog and inworld manifestations, and then it became a place in Bellisseria in Porridge Pot, and then finally it got a BBB stamp.

There's a very low-key "Letters of Transit" game associated with it, which few people play because it's very obscure and hidden and almost analog in nature -- and that's not usually what works in SL where attention spans are miniscule.

Even so, it's a thing, I chisel away at it sometimes and sometimes I get messages from it that there are "3 people" who played it or "0 people" in a row some weeks. It's just one of many things I tinker on, I think it's cool, and actually not so hard, but surprisingly few people who get stamps even bother to go inside a house to get its freebies, let alone play some mini-game within it. Oh, well.

So when I applied for the stamp, I explained some of this to Jezebel Bailey, at that time dealing with the applications. So here's the conversation (and remember kids, it is not a crime to publish chat logs outside the SL servers -- they don't have jurisdiction over other companies' servers in their TOS! In fact, it's a duty, to hold both residents and people in power to account -- that's important in any world. And it's all part of the gorgeous mosaic of SL history.

2021/04/07 19:45] Second Life: Inventory item 'Bellisseria Passport Application 2021 - Prokofy Neva' offered
[2021/04/07 19:46] Prokofy Neva: Hi, here's my passport application. Thanks
[2021/04/08 11:35] Second Life: secondlife:///app/agent/81f1414f-62d6-482a-a0e6-366ba7998661/about is offering friendship.

Would you be my friend?

(By default, you will be able to see each other's online status.)
[2021/04/08 11:35] Second Life: Friendship offer accepted.
[2021/04/08 11:35] Bel (jezebel.bailey): ty
[2021/06/18 15:33] Prokofy Neva: Hi, how do you get the HUD for the extra passport pages when you run out?
[2021/06/18 15:33] Prokofy Neva: or does it automatically deliver to you
[2021/06/18 15:34] Bel (jezebel.bailey): do you need a new hud?
[2021/06/18 15:34] Bel (jezebel.bailey): or another hud
[2021/06/18 15:34] Prokofy Neva: I have the upgraded passport already
[2021/06/18 15:34] Bel (jezebel.bailey): you should have gotten 3 of them named visa
[2021/06/18 15:34] Prokofy Neva: ok let me look
[2021/06/18 15:35] Prokofy Neva: why yes, it helps to search under the word "visa" and not "passport"
[2021/06/18 15:35] Bel (jezebel.bailey): haha that should hold you at this point
[2021/06/18 15:36] Prokofy Neva: yes I'm not excessively traveling
[2021/06/18 15:36] Bel (jezebel.bailey): but we can give more when needed
[2021/06/18 15:36] Prokofy Neva: I do have both vaccine shots but
[2021/06/18 15:37] Bel (jezebel.bailey): if the other person doesnt
[2021/06/18 15:37] Bel (jezebel.bailey): yours is no good
[2021/06/18 15:37] Prokofy Neva: yes I realize
[2021/06/18 15:37] Prokofy Neva: I realize you may start giving out shots soon
[2021/06/18 15:37] Prokofy Neva: I have a rare immune disease in RL but I don't think it applies in SL
[2021/06/18 15:38] Bel (jezebel.bailey): YES thats what we need next time
[2021/06/18 15:38] Bel (jezebel.bailey): next upgrade that when you go to locations for stamps it asks if you have any of the following
[2021/06/18 15:40] Prokofy Neva: you have to have your shots yes
[2021/06/18 15:41] Prokofy Neva: you seem like an important bureaucrat
[2021/06/18 15:41] Bel (jezebel.bailey): and if you reply wrong it denies you the passport
[2021/06/18 15:41] Prokofy Neva: yes
[2021/06/18 15:41] Bel (jezebel.bailey): hahah I shall talk to NOrth
[2021/06/18 15:41] Prokofy Neva: it could be random
[2021/06/18 15:41] Prokofy Neva: if you are important I will send you a thingn
[2021/06/18 15:41] Bel (jezebel.bailey): send away not sure how important I am but I have a bit of pull
[2021/06/18 15:42] Second Life: Inventory item 'Confidential Envelope 2' offered
[2021/06/18 15:42] Prokofy Neva: so this is a Letter of Transit from the Honorary Consulate of Titania
[2021/06/18 15:42] Prokofy Neva: these are rarely issued
[2021/06/18 15:42] Prokofy Neva: and they entitle you to certain goods and services
[2021/06/18 15:43] Prokofy Neva: which you cannot be told about
[2021/06/18 15:43] Prokofy Neva: altho one thing is known publicly which is the Diplomatic Pouch in 3 Bellisseria locations
[2021/06/18 15:43] Prokofy Neva: where you get a gift
[2021/06/18 15:45] Bel (jezebel.bailey): the diplomatic Pouch is that a private thing?
[2021/06/18 15:46] Prokofy Neva: no it's public but only works if you wear the Letter of Transit
[2021/06/18 15:46] Prokofy Neva: which you can only get at certain times
[2021/06/18 15:46] Prokofy Neva: if you think the BBB is bureaucratic, Titania is...glacial
[2021/06/18 15:47] Prokofy Neva: but since the prizes are all things I make, let me say that this isn't what you would call a high volume game
[2021/06/18 15:47] Prokofy Neva: : )
[2021/06/18 15:49] Second Life: Inventory item 'Honorary Consulate of Titania' offered
[2021/06/18 15:49] Bel (jezebel.bailey): would you mind if we used some of your ideas tweaked a little?
[2021/06/18 15:50] Prokofy Neva: well they aren't copyright at the US Bureau of Patents
[2021/06/18 15:52] Prokofy Neva: are you a Linden on your day job?
[2021/06/18 15:58] Bel (jezebel.bailey): hahah yeah but we are pretty careful on the things we use and if its ok its ok, Brat!
[2021/06/18 15:58] Prokofy Neva: well I will denounce you on my blog for shamelessly copying my ideas but let's see I think I had 37 readers yesterday
[2021/06/18 15:59] Prokofy Neva: I noticed that when I posted about a slidehow I had at one of my locations from Xenon Linden some Mole HASTENED to put up a slidehow TOO
[2021/06/18 15:59] Prokofy Neva: so trust me, it will not be the first time in my 17 years of living virtually that someone has copied my ideas and not even credited me
[2021/06/18 15:59] Bel (jezebel.bailey): hey word of mouth is the quickest way to get things out there and bad word of mouth is even faster
[2021/06/18 16:00] Prokofy Neva: We do not have a free press in Second Life
[2021/06/18 16:00] Prokofy Neva: in Bellisseria there are only groups
[2021/06/18 16:00] Prokofy Neva: so I'm sure your capacity to put out bad word of mouth is enormous but honestly, I don't care, I do my thing
[2021/06/18 16:01] Bel (jezebel.bailey): oh we will credit you!
[2021/06/18 16:01] Prokofy Neva: so what is your Linden name?
[2021/06/18 16:01] Bel (jezebel.bailey): when people start bitching about having to do the shots records I will give you all the credit
[2021/06/18 16:01] Bel (jezebel.bailey): I am not a linden I just run the BBB
[2021/06/18 16:02] Prokofy Neva: the Lindens have written in their TOS that they can take any creation of any creator and use it in their PR and have a paid-up perpetual license to do so, and really, that's common
[2021/06/18 16:02] Prokofy Neva: yes sure, you'll give me the credit to pile up more hate on me, that's understood : )
[2021/06/18 16:02] Prokofy Neva: I personally am pro-vaccine but you will find a lot of anti-vaxers in SL so good luck
[2021/06/18 16:02] Bel (jezebel.bailey): well I am not a Linden so I dont steal your stuff
[2021/06/18 16:03] Prokofy Neva: well as I said, my things are not copyrighted or patented, that would cost too much to do in RL
[2021/06/18 16:03] Bel (jezebel.bailey): at least I ask before I do
[2021/06/18 16:03] Bel (jezebel.bailey): yeah it would
[2021/06/18 16:03] Bel (jezebel.bailey): to bad you couldnt pay for it with Lindens
[2021/06/18 16:03] Prokofy Neva: I would think an attempt to do a vaccine like thing, even though it fits perfectly with the passport idea, will get all kinds of static
[2021/06/18 16:03] Prokofy Neva: but you could leave it to the venue owner maybe
[2021/06/18 16:04] Prokofy Neva: then they absorb the grief
[2021/06/18 16:04] Bel (jezebel.bailey): We would
[2021/06/18 16:04] Bel (jezebel.bailey): we would put something like Make sure your records are up to date
[2021/06/18 16:04] Prokofy Neva: hmm would I put this on any of mine? Maybe?
[2021/06/18 16:07] Prokofy Neva: I think there are two basic ingredients that define a virtual world
[2021/06/18 16:07] Prokofy Neva: 1) a sense of place 2) drama
[2021/06/18 16:07] Prokofy Neva: so you get this working for sure
[2021/06/18 16:09] Bel (jezebel.bailey): Absolutely

So fast forward to November 2021, and we find I'm not getting the credit because they didn't choose the obnoxious and controversial thing (vaccinations! whew, what a circus that would be!) but chose the "honorary ambassador" idea (I think this convo makes clear that I would only get credit for bad things that would lead to more hate, right? That would be consistent with past experience lol).

Why do I say "insincere" form of flattery? Because the idea is being stolen in fact without the credit -- but then we knew that -- and of course without me being offered an application to be one of those "ambassadors" or to "be in the room where it happens." But again, I don't want to be one, I'm my own ambassador for my own groups and locations (and so should you!). We can all be happy if the Lindens get more premium accounts, right? It's good for Second Life as a whole, yes?

Yes?

I used to be more confident affirming that premise of "the tide that raises all boats" than I am now, still...

I have to have a chuckle about how these people must not study international affairs in even the most casual way. So in real life, you have "ambassador plenipotentiary" -- that's appointed by a government, the "permanent representative" at the UN -- the US has five of them in New York alone and some poor countries only have a budget for one, in Geneva. Or you have honourary consul -- that is a lesser status usually more informally designated to represent their country's business interests in a city where there isn't already an embassy. So there isn't "honorary ambassador" in the way they are using it (which is more like consul). 

So what happened in recent years for all kinds of reasons, one of which is people don't understand what "honorary consul" is (an archaic term from the British Empire) and confuse it with "consulate general" -- yet another function which gives out passports. So now at the UN, they have "honorary ambassador" AKA "goodwill ambassador" to take on cultural functions on a specific issue, like, let's promote women's empowerment. So then you get this - a debacle around Wonder Woman (yeesh). The "honorary ambassador" or "goodwill ambassador" in the UN context is usually promoting a theme or an event, or a campaign, like "the Millenial Development Goals" as I saw in my 15 years covering the UN for various NGOs.

So they are not going out and recruiting various constituencies of people to "advocate for them in their home country" (in this case Bellisseria, as the newsletter explains). So the "honorary consul" in say, Nizhny Novgorod from America, is trying to drum up business for American companies there (well, at least until one professor of business who had taught there for 20 years was arrested for supposedly not having his visa in order). So ideally, if he is not in jail, he is helping Americans with contacts; he's not trying to find Russians to take back to America to help them develop businesses (and why do that when you have Donald Trump to do that for you -- or in theory, the Russian honorary consul in, say, Miami). Diplomacy is a system of reciprocities based on elaborate international law like the Vienna Conventions and practices; the informal "consul" or "goodwill ambassador" fits into the official structure. It's not one way, as it is in the SL edition -- the Lindens pick some people they like who they think will service as evangelists -- to use the Silicon Valley term borrowed from the Bible -- of their premium account -- those people round up the usual suspects under colour of "representing their interests with the Lindens" -- and then they buy premium.

Of course people argue about this sort of thing in RL --  different countries have different traditions -- and guess what, again, it doesn't matter, because we're in a virtual world and who cares.

With the BBB, we already have confusion generated by their term "Travel Advice" which sounds too much like "Travel Advisory" in real life. The BBB's "Travel Advice" is a list of recommended sites for tourists or businessmen, to promote more travel. The State Department's "Travel Advisory" is the opposite! It's to warn travellers of dangerous conditions. For example the State Department has a grade 4 Travel Advisory about the country Colombia due to COVID, civil wars, and -- as my son and his wife who just went despite these official US government warnings and warnings from their parents -- it has terrible drivers that make New Jersey look like a day at the beach. The first time I saw a "Travel Advice" from the BBB I did a double take -- were these aerodrome operators actually going to blacklist Mainland venues they didn't like? But no, it's ADVICE not ADVISORY -- you're supposed to slum it for an afternoon at the Mainland and get stamps!

How to Get People to Buy More Premium Accounts

So these grand personages in our virtual world will fan out and spread Belli love among non Bellis lol "They will represent and advocate for Bellisseria on the relevant continent. They'll be expected to get close to local residents and also to become their advocate within Bellisseria," as the BBB newsletter says.

Nota bene -- I don't wish to apply for this job and I suspect trying to manage all these "goodwill ambos" will become a burden, like keeping up the persona of the grumpy BBB official, and it will be retired. Maybe those people who always want the Lindens to build a railroad through my land in Grote will get recruited by this thing (land which the Lindens themselves auctioned, which was purchased by a furry, from whom I bought it). But these sorts of volunteer jobs are work, and doing them in a virtual context often leads to burn-out.

If I need to "advocate within Bellisseria" -- where I am a property owner -- I can handle that on my own I think? Or file a ticket with Support? I'm not planning a Trash Can Cuisine picnic with three-legged sack races any time soon in Belli so I don't need any Linden connex.

Ultimately, the Lindens can only justify the "honorary ambassadors" if it leads to more competition with Prokofy's rentals  more premium accounts of people who get homes in Bellisseria. I mean, how could you validate the staff time otherwise? As for the residents who sign up for this, one imagines it will fall closer on the spectrum to the American notion of such a job, involving sending people like Shirley Temple as ambassador to Czech Republic for a political favour because she donated to the presidential campaign, not sending highly trained British cadres with languages and years in foreign posts, or sending Russian officials abroad who are extremely loyal and now need to be rewarded for their service to the Motherland. 

I'm hazy on the part where these ambos "advocate" for say, Mainland customers of Linden Lab who are in, say, railroad groups that grew up around the old SLRR, "in Bellisseria". How does that work? They get these old furries to drop their grumbling about different guages and ride the rails in Belli? PS they need more than two rez areas to build up usage of that RR, and they need to overcome the tech fussing and put it in obviously places like Camp Sandwich and Ramstein Forest or whatever those places are called. BTW, if you are in Randelshtam, or whatsis, which has the great zip ride, the Honorary Consul of Titania is right behind it so come get a stamp.

I imagine that isn't going to work with that constituency. Or say, they go to one of these elaborate old elven communities or centaur havens like Rose Haven and get them to buy into Fantisseria, which is mainly norms who just put out some witch stuff now and then, not fullblown RP (and that's a good thing). Nuh-uh.

Really, the puzzle for the Lindens is this, and I feel for them: how to get real people and not yet another alt of GhostofaGhost Ghostly -- or Prokofy's alts, for that matter -- to pony up $11.99/mo or $99/annualized. 

The fact that the Lindens now send the Moles to moderate the forums (!!!) instead of using their actual talents building and scripting lets us know that the Lindens are meddling experimenting in the Metaverse again.

Showing Up

I guess they will have to iron out these details but I think as Woody Allen said, 99 percent of life is just showing up (but you don't want him to show up). I think some people wouldn't want Lindens at their wedding nor would they want to be strung into helping the business of some Belli House Beautiful matron who makes house add-ons. As the earliest Lindens used to say: "Lindens don't scale." Hence, the birth of the Moles, who scale better because you can pay Ukrainians $10/hour and it will seem like a lot of money. But the job is big and Moles don't scale ultimately, either, plus, after you recruited and trained all these people and you are done (for now) rolling out Belli homes, what can you do with them? (Oh, I know! have them moderate the forums!).

So who can you have scale? The FIC, the trustees, the worthies, the people who aren't even like Ukrainians and don't even need $10/hour, although the prospect of having their DJ business pump up could be attractive.

I think it's important to remember that many, many people bought premiums and joined Bellisseria, and not just the old FIC and their 10 alts each. It's a good thing for new people. And the lion's share of these people are not in the 120 or so Bellisseria groups, and not only because they said bad words and got evicted. The overwhelming majority of the "citizens of Bellisseria" did NOT put out the Moles pumpkin Trick or Treat buckets. And that's actually the hope of this Trumansville -- that it will live and thrive on its own terms, without the "help" of insider residents and their Linden/Moles.

 

Update: I tried my idea of using the Operation Mainland DIY Kiosk, which you put on your head, to record a Linden site (in this case Magellan's Crash). I took the picture, clicked on the box -- but oops, it doesn't work because scripts are turned off for "everyone" at these Linden sites. So I stood on my land adjacent to it, to get it to work. Not very satisfactory as there won't always be resident land you can stand on with scripts turned on for "everyone" near Linden sites, either. The Lindens make it hard to bookmark many of their "newer" sites in Nautilus, Corsica etc because they merely call it "Protected Land" and its name doesn't save on a landmark. You have to make the landmark and right on the spot, rename it to the Linden name of the place, or your own name, or a sim name, to find it again. They do make it hard! 

PS Notice I didn't get into a discussion about how the BBB, which is basically the same thing as the core founders of Campbell Community (it took me awhile to figure that out), may not be the best "ambassadors" to be sending out to community groups to recruit them to Bellisseria/premium accounts given how they and their land baron of choice just treated the "hinterland" residents who supported their community and even some of their core -- by putting all the easements and roads to sale in large batches for low prices when their land baron Maecenas found his business wasn't doing so well and had to shorten sail. Unsuspecting residents were lured into Campbell to buy nicely landscaped parcels in a planned community on the open market in Mainland for 0.4/m -- a rare occurrence on Mainland. Then a few days later, the easements and roads all went to sale -- got bought by various people -- got abandoned -- leaving these sections in a plight something like Pleasantville in the Twilight Zone with Anthony Fremont. And here we all are. But this is for another post and another day. 

PPS It occurred to me -- I should have realized this earlier! -- that this particular FICing with the Hax-Anatine nuptials is to keep up with the Jones in the Metaverse. Recently, Roblox made new people-like skins for their blocky kids that look like Legos. AND they announced that you cannot have partners, weddings -- you know, sex -- in their angular world. Makes sense, because it's mainly for children.  No politics, either -- but that would have been harder for Patch Linden to fete -- no politics are allowed in Belli or the forums, although tacitly conceded inworld on the Mainland and on private islands -- there are still Trump lawn signs all over the Mainland and various socialist and anarchist and even communist projects, one of which harasses me routinely in Marietta at my anti-communist memorial.

The Lindens want to show with a high-profile society wedding also launching the community center that you CAN get married in SL (although not everyone is going to get a company representative as a best man, but most people won't care about that part).

I don't know the estimated share of the economy that weddings possess but it's a very big business. Not everyone wants to get e-married but some of the content produced for weddings (like Atelier's new items at Anthem) could be purchased for any occasion, especially bouquets. Many people feature their wedding in their picks as the highlight of their virtual lives, just as in real life.

Appeal to Linden Lab Re: 3-Day Forums Ban and Response

No surprise here -- it took Dakota Linden less than 24 hours to cut and paste the TOS back to me without responding to what I view as a troubling phenomenon I never used to see on the forums -- removal of content without a notice of a disciplinary action, sometimes when threads are closed for everyone. I'm not for having these infantile speech laws but if you have them, I think they should be practiced consistently. So if you remove a post that says something critical of Linden Lab and its staff even in the mildest form, or any form, you should generate a notice that says "Warning, your content has been removed for trolling". Or "spam," as it was designated when I opened two other threads besides the official company-made thread about the gatcha machine ban. I thought it useful to make an appeal for the record, so here it is, with the curt response:

#1758300

While I realize it is futile as no Linden will challenge their boss, I would like to appeal the current 3-day forums bans and past actions against me on the forums as I see they are arbitrary. When only the company can make a thread on such a controversial issue as the gatcha ban, and any other thread, even conducted with civility, is dubbed "spam" as mine were, your reputation for legitimate critical forums suffers. I made a list of demands to LL regarding mitigation of the policy, not opposing it, pulling my list out of a 300+ page thread as a very distinct different subject. There was no "fighting" in it and it was calmly discussed. Two of the demands, ironically, have already been met. My 2nd thread was in the "Merchants" sub-forum and was about strategies to cope with the gatcha ban, not addressed in the main thread which was mainly about whether it was illegal or legal, whether the people who made or bought gatchas were predators or chumps worthy of contempt, etc. In that thread, one repeated commenter injustifiably kept dubbing the thread as spam or trolling and may have AR'd it, but I don't think that's where this ban came from.

Curiously, my comment in the main thread about how Bellisseria residents, which includes me, as the middle class that can adapt to this change and buy more expensive non-transferable furniture, and that other forms of illegal activity will re-appear in SL as people cope, was simply removed and no reference was made to it (see attached), i.e. it was not characterized as "spam" or given a notice. That's disturbing. While I view the forum TOS and enforcement as a "contract of cohesion" often clumsily enforced, it has its own logic which many people accept. Removing content with *no* notice and not under the description of a given offense is arbitrary even within LL's terms.

Legions of posters have referred to Belli as "Trumansville" or "Stepford Wives" and criticized its uniformity. Quoting Pete Seeger on "little boxes of ticky-tacky that all look the same" is no different; what is "ticky tacky" if not virtuality? Surely you can concede the houses have limited variety and repeat endlessly? Surely you can concede that Belli, which I have praised as a successful Linden showcase project helping retention and socializing as well as the economy, is not for everyone? Far worse criticism has been tolerated; all that's different here is that it comes from me.

 

This is the 4th time I have had content removed, on some occasions, without *any* notification at all, which goes against the corporate standards of due process you have established in 18 years; in one case, a comment was removed without action, yet the response to it including a copy of it was not removed, illustrating the haste with which the removal was made. In another case, in the middle of his busy workday, Patch came to a thread personally in which forums regulars were harassing a newbie who dared to use the term "sim". Path insisted that we call these entities "regions" and posted a redlined copy of the Knowledge page (!) then removed my comment in defense of the newbie, closed the thread, but took no moderation action against me. This is truly unjustifiable, when the harassers of the newbie are left unscathed. Deletion of content with or without thread closure, with no notification of action under the TOS to the user, should not be allowed.

 

Another time, the reasons were again inexplicable and again involved Patch personally -- and mysteriously. If there is a rule that no poster can criticize or mention in any critical light the VP of Program of LL, then say so, put it in the TOS for the forums. I think this grows from a personal antagonism that may have begun inworld in 2007 on his original avatar, whose identity I don't know, but suspect as one of a crew who constantly harassed me on the forums and inworld for my critical comments about their favouritism. LL has come a long way from those days of the FIC and improved its practices, and since banning me arbitrarily from the forums in 2005 or 2006, a ban which was reversed as soon as the relevant Linden left that position. Personal antagonism is understood, given the toxicity of the forums and anger at policies which sometimes LL is forced itself to implement due to law (although no relevant law or cases have been cited in this curious sudden gatcha ban). But the tools of moderation or inworld bans should not be wielded by those in power simply because of irritation. That is why I make this statement for the record, again, without any expectation of action.

 

• Dakota Linden

  said 16 hours ago

  Hello Prokofy Neva,

  
  

  Linden Lab just completed its review, at your request, of a disciplinary action taken against your account.

   

  Our investigation shows that the suspension of your account was correctly applied in alignment with the Second Life Terms & Conditions and/or Second Life Community Standards. You may review the Terms & Conditions in full at https://www.lindenlab.com/legal/second-life-terms-and-conditions.

   

  If any further information is required, Linden Lab will contact you regarding this incident. Otherwise, please consider the matter resolved.

   

  Sincerely,

   

  Dakota Linden

  Account Specialist 

  Linden Lab

   

  
  
  

I'm going to be sure to send a response that Dakota Linden should get a "long lunch" when asked to rate his work because I think he pasted the TOS back to me very neatly. and expressed the nature of the "managed democracy" of the forums quite aptly.

 

I'm going to note for the record, although they could be entirely unrelated, that I've had a string of incidents lately in which the behaviour of various now former tenants or random harpies flying from the sky seemed calculated, as if to force me either to abuse report them or be accused of abetting their violation of the TOS or, to be riled and then break the TOS so they could AR me, i.e. swearing in General. I can only take these things in stride and move on.

 

Prigs and Prats from Second Life: Coastal Waterways

I see no reason to use the word "bitch" -- or worse -- for the sort of smug bitches you find on the SL forums -- "prig" will do. It's British and not American, and already sounds more literary!

"Prat" instead of "incompetent idiot" or "dumbass" seems more literary too. Why not be more literary to describe the forums and those inworld who behave badly?

So this is my new rubric, and here are two forums regulars who are regularly a prig.

Bitsy Buccaneer at least makes nice murals and statues which I have bought for many years. I thought she made houses, even, I had seen one and even decorated one in a contest, and then got a free one -- but it turns out that house was made by someone with a similar name. 

From the forums (likely to be closed or deleted by Lindens, hence republication)

Prokofy Neva

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Posted yesterday at 02:43 AM

The best thing about these sims, really, was the names. I go visit them mainly once a year. I guess because "jungle" isn't what I want so much as "northwest". 

I've been going to these docks and rez areas and beaches not even so much around Bellissaria but the other continents. One problem with them is that when you take their landmarks, you are left with a generic name that doesn't help you remember what it was.

Bitsy Buccaneer

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Posted yesterday at 03:08 AM

  On 3/30/2020 at 2:43 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

when you take their landmarks, you are left with a generic name that doesn't help you remember what it was.

Landmark names can be edited. A friend drops LMs on me when he finds somewhere he thinks I'd like and I always add a FROM GEORGE on the end so I can find it again 

 

Tari Landar

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Posted yesterday at 03:27 AM

  On 3/30/2020 at 3:08 AM, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

Landmark names can be edited. A friend drops LMs on me when he finds somewhere he thinks I'd like and I always add a FROM GEORGE on the end so I can find it again 

I have a LOT of LMs that have changed names, most of my lms actually have different names than they did when I got them. Some of my earliest say things like "bits and danglies editing", "those blue flower things", "big bug thingy", "that one room, with the painting", "stretchy place", "really cool trees", "box", "worm place", "Weird", "bubble", "giant *****show", "Idiot room"...you know, fun stuff that you're not likely to remember when you need to 

I don't dare delete them, even though most no longer go anywhere at all, I'm a sentimental sod, sometimes. I can only tell you where some of those actually originally lead to, and a few of them actually went to the same region, just different spots, lol.  The first two went to a place I used to take people after field trips to xcite..for obvious reasons.  Big bug thingy was a giant bug..duh, but also on the sim with the first two just on the opposite end lol.  Dunno about room with the painting.  STretchy place was Dark Dharma's Haunted somethin, or somewhere along those lines, my spelling is prob. off, but there was something in the building that caused the stretch deform.  Dunno about cool trees. Box was my building box, a literal box, for about four years. Dunno on worm place. Weird was some random sim that just had all kinds of odd things on it, kinda strewn about, quite nonsensical but not always in a good way, it was like the grid just randomly tossed stuff there, it's hard to explain, lol, but I learned a lot about building from that weird place.  Bubble is that bubble ride. Giant *****show was a really messed up freebie place, lol. Idiot room I actually had a bunch of each with different numbers and lead to different problematic welcome areas (And places like welcome areas) around the grid..ie...idiots  All but two were created in 2008

Prokofy Neva

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Posted yesterday at 08:08 AM

  On 3/30/2020 at 3:08 AM, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

Landmark names can be edited. A friend drops LMs on me when he finds somewhere he thinks I'd like and I always add a FROM GEORGE on the end so I can find it again 

Yeah I know. I've been in SL 16 years. Again, when you take these landmarks, they are generic and don't help you remember where they are. If you are flying around and taking landmarks, and not stopping to edit them. Now, why is this? It seems to me the Lindens could make them work better so that no one has to edit them. Yes, if you click on them, you go back to that place, but again, there is nothing to make it have a unique name like every other place in SL.

Bitsy Buccaneer

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Posted yesterday at 08:17 AM

  On 3/30/2020 at 8:08 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Yeah I know. I've been in SL 16 years. Again, when you take these landmarks, they are generic and don't help you remember where they are. If you are flying around and taking landmarks, and not stopping to edit them. Now, why is this? It seems to me the Lindens could make them work better so that no one has to edit them. Yes, if you click on them, you go back to that place, but again, there is nothing to make it have a unique name like every other place in SL.

The LM name comes from the parcel. The owner of the parcel gives it the name.

Are you complaining about this in general or because the Lindens didn't name things to your specifications in their parcels?

Tari Landar

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Posted yesterday at 08:31 AM

  On 3/30/2020 at 8:08 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Yes, if you click on them, you go back to that place, but again, there is nothing to make it have a unique name like every other place in SL.

They are named after their parcel...just like every other place in SL. If you want it to be more unique than that, there still very much is something that can do this, it's called you. Stopping for a few seconds, at most, while flying to name a LM you know has the name of the parcel (because that's how LMs work) really isn't that difficult, nor time consuming. I do it all the time. I have huge groupings of LMs from specific sims, one sim in particular has at least 20 different LMs. It took me seconds, at most, to rename those LMs as I was wandering, flying, riding, walking, boating, and whatever else I was doing at the time. It's not a daunting task at all. 

I'm not understanding why this is a problem, those LMs function like every other LM in sl, regardless of who owns the parcel to which the LM leads. 

 

Prokofy Neva

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Posted yesterday at 10:32 AM (edited)

  On 3/30/2020 at 8:17 AM, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

The LM name comes from the parcel. The owner of the parcel gives it the name.

Are you complaining about this in general or because the Lindens didn't name things to your specifications in their parcels?

No, it's not about naming anything to my specifications, that's silly. It's about hundreds of Linden locations having THE EXACT SAME NAME SO YOU CAN'T TELL THEM APART IN INVENTORY UNLESS YOU MANAGED TO RENAME THEM.

I think you and Tari Landar have never visited these Linden places so you can't understand what I'm talking about, but that's common.

Anyone who explores a lot in SL and enjoys the Linden places get this, but you don't because you don't.

It's a chore to have to re-name LMs especially when you deal with thousands of them constantly because you run rentals and a land preserve where they are constantly needed and updated and when you put them on servers to be issued every day. But that's not an experience you have, either, so never mind.

They don't function like every other LM.

Here's a good example. The label on the land parcel is "Coastal Waterway" -- like a zillion other Linden parcels. this one is actually an entire sim.

Here it is: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Gilpatric/148/248/22

Yes, once you pull up the map after clicking on it, you see "oh, it's that one in Gilpatric". Er, what continent was that on again? There are 5000 sims and you can't always remember. Yes, you can use the continent locator.

Here's another nice location near the beach I first posted -- this is a nice dock. But if you click on it, it makes a landmark that is called....wait for it...Coastal Waterway.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Gilpatric/14/218/25

Once you pull up the map, you see, yeah, it's in Gilpatrick, and yeah, it's not in the same location as the beach.

But in your inventory, with thousands of other landmarks, it's joining a collection called COASTAL WATERWAY of which there are jillions.

The dock isn't on its own parcel, although it could be, which might increase its use as people can get to it precisely easier -- if it has its own landing point and -- wait for it -- distinct name.  Lindens take the time to build these things, but they sit unused often. Taking the time to parcel them and name them distinctly, even "Gilpatric Dock on Coastal Waterway" just makes it easier to find again in inventory and share around, "Here's this great Linden dock I found".

It's hard to share a thing that says "Coastal Waterway" that joins a zillion other "Coastal Waterways" in inventory.

The Lindens are really brilliant at naming, very creative. But on these areas, they just didn't take the time. And while I realize they are busy, I'm suggesting that WHEN they can find time to 1) name distinctly 2) parcel 3) create separate landings which really only takes a few seconds they will see more usage because people can identify it readily without clicking on dozens of landmarks in their inventory, all of which say the same thing.

If you think it's just a problem of these particular sims I stumbled across, no, it's not.

Here's another one.

And another one

And another one

And another one

All of them, all over the grid -- and I could give you scads more -- all have the label COASTAL WATERWAY in my inventory. If you're having trouble grasping that they all have the same name because when you click on the forums, they show a SLURL with numbers and a sim name, go there, make yourself a landmark, and see how it looks in your inventory which is...wait for it...COASTAL WATERWAY.

Yeah, some of them I re-labelled on the fly because that's easy enough to do and I'm not stupid. But now I have an LM that says "Skradski". What is Skradski again? Skradski actually isn't a "coastal waterway" per se, and not a beach and not a dock. It's a little island with a castle on it which is pretty cool. 

So while I could name it "Pretty cool little Linden island with castle on it," quite frankly, so could the Moles as they build them. They will get this, even if you won't, so that's why once again, on the forums, I walk around the robots.

Edited yesterday at 10:38 AM by Prokofy Neva

 

Bitsy Buccaneer

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Posted 9 hours ago

  On 3/30/2020 at 10:32 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

I think you and Tari Landar have never visited these Linden places so you can't understand what I'm talking about, but that's common.

Anyone who explores a lot in SL and enjoys the Linden places get this, but you don't because you don't.

It's a chore to have to re-name LMs especially when you deal with thousands of them constantly because you run rentals and a land preserve where they are constantly needed and updated and when you put them on servers to be issued every day. But that's not an experience you have, either, so never mind.

Good morning Prok, did you have a pleasant time slating and slandering us for taking part in the conversation? I hope you did 

Anyway, I don't run rentals or a land preserve or a server. You're right on that. But I do sometimes make things to travel about on and include a notecard with some of my favourite scenic Linden locations and nearby rez areas (always Linden because they're stable and reliable). I have more annotated LMs for good places to take snaps to make the vendor images from. It's never been a big deal to me to amend an LM after I take it. It's just part of taking an LM 🤷‍♀️. I notice if it's sufficient or if more is needed and if more is needed, I add something. Do it with shops, places I come across on my travels, friends' places, wherever I think I might want to go back to.

When we were new, friends and I would explore endlessly. We'd spend days doing it and getting lost was part of the fun. We weren't in the mindset to document it all with countless LMs though, only enough to get us back to certain places and general areas. That we don't have your habits doesn't mean we don't enjoy Linden places. Why do you assume we don't simply because we don't share your particular habits?

May I be allowed to wonder how many are similar to me, my friends, Tari and how many might be like you? I suspect there's very few who process and update LMs in their thousands on a regular basis, and even fewer who do it without bots.

Anyway, wishing you a lovely day. All the best  

 
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Rufferta

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Posted 2 hours ago

  On 3/30/2020 at 10:32 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

No, it's not about naming anything to my specifications, that's silly. It's about hundreds of Linden locations having THE EXACT SAME NAME SO YOU CAN'T TELL THEM APART IN INVENTORY UNLESS YOU MANAGED TO RENAME THEM..........

I'd been collecting landmarks for interesting places for years before I realized I should rename them to avoid duplication and confusion - now I (try to) start with the region name, some description, then the 'official' landmark' name.

Same goes for naming things as you build - keeps you from having an inventory full of "Object"s.

I'm glad the jungle regions are back. I have fond memories of doing the first quests. I don't need a lot of high-definition scenary to be happy - sometimes you have to use your imagination* - and the Pioneer Moles had wonderful creativity, imagination, and great senses of humor**

*why I still play Minecraft sometimes

**not that the current Moles aren't creative, imaginative, and funny***, but they have more pixels to play with.

***which reminds me about the original topic - I swear I saw a region on the map last week named "We Are All Doomed", but now I can't find it.

 
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Posted 1 hour ago

  9 hours ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

Good morning Prok, did you have a pleasant time slating and slandering us for taking part in the conversation? I hope you did 

Anyway, I don't run rentals or a land preserve or a server. You're right on that. But I do sometimes make things to travel about on and include a notecard with some of my favourite scenic Linden locations and nearby rez areas (always Linden because they're stable and reliable). I have more annotated LMs for good places to take snaps to make the vendor images from. It's never been a big deal to me to amend an LM after I take it. It's just part of taking an LM 🤷‍♀️. I notice if it's sufficient or if more is needed and if more is needed, I add something. Do it with shops, places I come across on my travels, friends' places, wherever I think I might want to go back to.

When we were new, friends and I would explore endlessly. We'd spend days doing it and getting lost was part of the fun. We weren't in the mindset to document it all with countless LMs though, only enough to get us back to certain places and general areas. That we don't have your habits doesn't mean we don't enjoy Linden places. Why do you assume we don't simply because we don't share your particular habits?

May I be allowed to wonder how many are similar to me, my friends, Tari and how many might be like you? I suspect there's very few who process and update LMs in their thousands on a regular basis, and even fewer who do it without bots.

Anyway, wishing you a lovely day. All the best  

I stand by everything I've written here because it's true. And I'll repaste what I said because it's true, again:

I think you and Tari Landar have never visited these Linden places so you can't understand what I'm talking about, but that's common.

Anyone who explores a lot in SL and enjoys the Linden places get this, but you don't because you don't.

1. I surmised -- "I think" that you must NOT have have visited these places. Because you denied that this was an issue -- and still do. And I have to conclude that no, you still have not visited the Coastal Waterway issues because you are still huffing and puffing.

2. Those who explore the *Linden* places as distinct from any other place of which there are zillions knows this is a frustration especially when sharing something. I encountered this in my Mainland Appreciation Group with me and others having a bunch of "Coastal Waterways" and not knowing what they hooked up to FROM INVENTORY until we tested on the map - one more chore.

3. I'll say it again: you must not go to Linden docks which are nothing special with no markings, and get COASTAL WATERWAY and get frustrated. I have no doubt that your inventory does not contain COASTAL WATERWAY now -- and you'd admit that if you were writing in good faith here -- and it's not because you went and re-named them on the fly.

Nothing you've said or Tari said proves that you go to these places because if you did, you'd at least get the problem -- and you don't.

When people response to a statement of fact with "You are slandering me," I can often conclude that they understood something is true, but can't admit it.

Re: "But I do sometimes make things to travel about on and include a notecard with some of my favourite scenic Linden locations and nearby rez areas (always Linden because they're stable and reliable

No doubt these aren't COASTAL WATERWAY as you would have had this problem so many times you would have joined me in asking the Lindens to fix this. Old Linden places do have labels. These new ones do NOT. If you have these in a giver at your store, great, but they may not have Coastal -- and I bet you do NOT have them. Because if you DID, by now, customers would be saying , "Hey, these things are all named the same."

Another thing I can understand about it is that instead of serving the public, serving people and preventing their confusion, it's more important to you to rage about being "slandered". (By the way, "libel" is the correct legal term for *written* speech).

These Linden areas are all named the same which means landmarking them is pointless and cuts down on their visits and sharing. 

It's hard to keep re-naming lots of landmarks as you fly around and it's easier for the Lindens to give unique names to parcels they make as they parcel them. After all, they want use of their free places.

It's not a big deal for anybody to rename a landmark BUT THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE TO. Many people landmarking these nice places DO NOT REALIZE THEY ARE ALL NAMED EXACTLY THE SAME and will have trouble sorting them and returning them and - yes, renaming them.

I guess you don't have that many customers so you don't think first of what is a problem for YOUR CUSTOMERS, then a problem for you as the manager of a small boutique business. I do.

If you log in and travel, that's great, but since so many of the mainly anonymous and unaccountable people on these forums do NOT, and make avatars with zero activity to post on the forums, it's a safe assumption.

Most people who are ordinary and not on the forums and not special and not in with the Moles find it difficult to do this. Some don't even know you *can* do this. Some can't make landmarks. You are not thinking of this because you don't deal with the masses; you deal with a small sub-sett of the SL population who buy old mosaics for their walls. bTW that includes me, who has a) bought your products for years b) won a design contest in your house, giving you enormous amounts of publicity.

It's easier to keep sniping and raging and imagining that things you do are the norm though, isn't it?

Well, don't. 

PPS I stopped by your store. I didn't see any landmark givers of interesting places to explore, but that's ok, it's not required, people can just be hobbyists and just collect places and sometimes share them. Let's recall how you greeted my point about this problem:

Landmark names can be edited. A friend drops LMs on me when he finds somewhere he thinks I'd like and I always add a FROM GEORGE on the end so I can find it again 

The LM name comes from the parcel. The owner of the parcel gives it the name.

Are you complaining about this in general or because the Lindens didn't name things to your specifications in their parcels?

So before you rant and rage some more about "slander," consider that your nasty, vicious, stupid, vitriolic comments to me about things that we both know I know and are obvious -- and aren't the point -- just to be "clever" -- they get a pushback from me. You then focus on that pushback and not your behaviour as if you are flying around in a white robe like one of your art pieces.

PPPS I considered buying the Pompei Bouillabase which is nice but I knew you had copied it from the Internet -- it's in the public domain after all -- and I could pay $10 and upload it -- after lightening it in Paint -- rather than $225. I do buy public domain from people even for that much. It's a skill to get it framed and lighted properly and looking good in SL and I value that. But sometimes my own $10 upload will do.

Edited just now by Prokofy Neva

 

 
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Prokofy Neva

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Posted 1 hour ago

  2 hours ago, Rufferta said:

I'd been collecting landmarks for interesting places for years before I realized I should rename them to avoid duplication and confusion - now I (try to) start with the region name, some description, then the 'official' landmark' name.

Same goes for naming things as you build - keeps you from having an inventory full of "Object"s.

I'm glad the jungle regions are back. I have fond memories of doing the first quests. I don't need a lot of high-definition scenary to be happy - sometimes you have to use your imagination* - and the Pioneer Moles had wonderful creativity, imagination, and great senses of humor**

*why I still play Minecraft sometimes

**not that the current Moles aren't creative, imaginative, and funny***, but they have more pixels to play with.

***which reminds me about the original topic - I swear I saw a region on the map last week named "We Are All Doomed", but now I can't find it.

You're a good use case to prove my point. You do an enormous amount of exploring as I know from chatting with you as you have come to my land preserve areas.

If you didn't realize you have to rename them, how much more the average schmo who is just flying around trying to enjoy SL.

I am very savvy about making and renaming land-marks, because I run 3-4 servers with interesting places I update constantly with landmarks I sometimes rename because the Lindens named them all the same in the Coastal Areas and because people rename things or re-parcel. It's not a problem for me to do this.

But I recognize IT IS A PROBLEM THAT THE LINDENS CAN FIX EASILY AND NOT MAKE ANNOYANCE FOR OTHERS. More to the point, fix and get A LOT MORE USE OF THEIR LAND.

That there are two forums regulars who regularly snipe and hate on me who can't grasp this, and have to rant and rage about how it is easy to do, or I should do it or else I'm a moron, is never surprising. As I said, Lindens, even Lindens who might close this thread, are so much better than forums regs who behave like this. They get it. They will rename their parcels -- watch them.

Yes I saw that region too. Was that Linden? Well, whatever. Let's hope not.

The Lindens can easily ensure that THOUSANDS of their special locations ARE NOT ALL NAMED EXACTLY THE SAME, COASTAL WATERWAY. They may not have reflected on this. They make the places, then go to the next and don't worry about how to get use out of them; how to share them. They may figure if it says the sim name when you click and use "show on map," that's enough.

But the average clueless SL travelers, casual or experience, doesn't first check the map. they just go. They make a landmark. And now have a mess. The end.

 

 
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BITSY BUCCANEER

Good morning Prok, did you have a pleasant time slating and slandering us for taking part in the conversation? I hope you did 

Anyway, I don't run rentals or a land preserve or a server. You're right on that. But I do sometimes make things to travel about on and include a notecard with some of my favourite scenic Linden locations and nearby rez areas (always Linden because they're stable and reliable). I have more annotated LMs for good places to take snaps to make the vendor images from. It's never been a big deal to me to amend an LM after I take it. It's just part of taking an LM 🤷‍♀️. I notice if it's sufficient or if more is needed and if more is needed, I add something. Do it with shops, places I come across on my travels, friends' places, wherever I think I might want to go back to.

When we were new, friends and I would explore endlessly. We'd spend days doing it and getting lost was part of the fun. We weren't in the mindset to document it all with countless LMs though, only enough to get us back to certain places and general areas. That we don't have your habits doesn't mean we don't enjoy Linden places. Why do you assume we don't simply because we don't share your particular habits?

May I be allowed to wonder how many are similar to me, my friends, Tari and how many might be like you? I suspect there's very few who process and update LMs in their thousands on a regular basis, and even fewer who do it without bots.

Anyway, wishing you a lovely day. All the best  

PROKOFY NEVA

I stand by everything I've written here because it's true. And I'll repaste what I said because it's true, again:

I think you and Tari Landar have never visited these Linden places so you can't understand what I'm talking about, but that's common.

Anyone who explores a lot in SL and enjoys the Linden places get this, but you don't because you don't.

1. I surmised -- "I think" that you must NOT have have visited these places. Because you denied that this was an issue -- and still do. And I have to conclude that no, you still have not visited the Coastal Waterway issues because you are still huffing and puffing.

2. Those who explore the *Linden* places as distinct from any other place of which there are zillions knows this is a frustration especially when sharing something. I encountered this in my Mainland Appreciation Group with me and others having a bunch of "Coastal Waterways" and not knowing what they hooked up to FROM INVENTORY until we tested on the map - one more chore.

3. I'll say it again: you must not go to Linden docks which are nothing special with no markings, and get COASTAL WATERWAY and get frustrated. I have no doubt that your inventory does not contain COASTAL WATERWAY now -- and you'd admit that if you were writing in good faith here -- and it's not because you went and re-named them on the fly.

Nothing you've said or Tari said proves that you go to these places because if you did, you'd at least get the problem -- and you don't.

When people response to a statement of fact with "You are slandering me," I can often conclude that they understood something is true, but can't admit it.

Re: "But I do sometimes make things to travel about on and include a notecard with some of my favourite scenic Linden locations and nearby rez areas (always Linden because they're stable and reliable

No doubt these aren't COASTAL WATERWAY as you would have had this problem so many times you would have joined me in asking the Lindens to fix this. Old Linden places do have labels. These new ones do NOT. If you have these in a giver at your store, great, but they may not have Coastal -- and I bet you do NOT have them. Because if you DID, by now, customers would be saying , "Hey, these things are all named the same."

Another thing I can understand about it is that instead of serving the public, serving people and preventing their confusion, it's more important to you to rage about being "slandered". (By the way, "libel" is the correct legal term for *written* speech).

These Linden areas are all named the same which means landmarking them is pointless and cuts down on their visits and sharing. 

It's hard to keep re-naming lots of landmarks as you fly around and it's easier for the Lindens to give unique names to parcels they make as they parcel them. After all, they want use of their free places.

It's not a big deal for anybody to rename a landmark BUT THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE TO. Many people landmarking these nice places DO NOT REALIZE THEY ARE ALL NAMED EXACTLY THE SAME and will have trouble sorting them and returning them and - yes, renaming them.

I guess you don't have that many customers so you don't think first of what is a problem for YOUR CUSTOMERS, then a problem for you as the manager of a small boutique business. I do.

If you log in and travel, that's great, but since so many of the mainly anonymous and unaccountable people on these forums do NOT, and make avatars with zero activity to post on the forums, it's a safe assumption.

Most people who are ordinary and not on the forums and not special and not in with the Moles find it difficult to do this. Some don't even know you *can* do this. Some can't make landmarks. You are not thinking of this because you don't deal with the masses; you deal with a small sub-sett of the SL population who buy old mosaics for their walls. bTW that includes me, who has a) bought your products for years b) won a design contest in your house, giving you enormous amounts of publicity.

It's easier to keep sniping and raging and imagining that things you do are the norm though, isn't it?

Well, don't. 

PPS I stopped by your store. I didn't see any landmark givers of interesting places to explore, but that's ok, it's not required, people can just be hobbyists and just collect places and sometimes share them. Let's recall how you greeted my point about this problem:

Landmark names can be edited. A friend drops LMs on me when he finds somewhere he thinks I'd like and I always add a FROM GEORGE on the end so I can find it again 

The LM name comes from the parcel. The owner of the parcel gives it the name.

Are you complaining about this in general or because the Lindens didn't name things to your specifications in their parcels?

So before you rant and rage some more about "slander," consider that your nasty, vicious, stupid, vitriolic comments to me about things that we both know I know and are obvious -- and aren't the point -- just to be "clever" -- they get a pushback from me. You then focus on that pushback and not your behaviour as if you are flying around in a white robe like one of your art pieces.

PPPS I considered buying the Pompei Bouillabase which is nice but I knew you had copied it from the Internet -- it's in the public domain after all -- and I could pay $10 and upload it -- after lightening it in Paint -- rather than $225. I do buy public domain from people even for that much. It's a skill to get it framed and lighted properly and looking good in SL and I value that. But sometimes my own $10 upload will do.

Edited just now by Prokofy Neva

 

 

The New Avatars Look Like Ass and the Lindens Hate Us

I'm sorry if there are any little creators whose feelings will be hurt, but it has to be said plainly: the new avatars, just like the rows of ones before them, look like ass and make me wonder if the Lindens hate us.

Could they be hoping to drive traffic to their new shiny by giving us ugly avatars? 

Honestly, they are AWFUL. I've tried on a number of them, the males especially and they are just UGLY and STUPID. I mean, my God, look at them outside the haze of Linden fandom and their distorted drawings/pictures of them that don't show what they are like.

The faces are snarling, surly, suspicious -- when they aren't mentally retarded or stoned.

There is just a very bad vibe from these avatars and I can't understand why someone would inflict this on an entire world.

Please tell me this guy doesn't look mentally retarded and/or stoned -- with red-rimmed eyes, likely the latter.

A thug, and a low-IQ thug at that....

 

Suspicious, snarling, nasty....

Heavy-lidded suspicion or a bad heroin habit.

A scorpion. Yeah, just the sort of intellectually-stimulating and cordial sort of steam-punk look we all would love to have...

Have they not heard of grace, of fine intelligence, of a spark in the eye, of love?

These expressions are all the most surly, drug-addled or mentally diminished that you could come up with. Maybe it's a statement on online life in general, such as Andrew Sullivan has been making.

But it's really God-awful and should never have been allowed in the Library to cause misery to hundreds of thousands of people.