Second Thoughts

In the Old Days, People Built Their Own Houses...

Back in 2015 -- 8 years ago -- I wrote, "In the old days, people built their own houses" when I saw a build while cruising around Zoe, one of the Ancient Sims. For some reason this blog post came up as something hit by a reader today and I recalled I wanted essentially to say it again.

So now, yes, 8 years later, I had the same reaction when finding someone who built their own house recently in the Zoe/Clementina area. It truly is a wondrous thing to build your own house. To "turn your own wrenches" as this interesting Wired account about the van life phrased it. I turn my own wrenches a good deal in SL, but I'm only an amateur builder who generally has to just add my prims or sculpties or prefab mesh pieces to someone else's build to modify it. Even so, it is one of the greatest satisfactions of virtual life; I would say really THE greatest satisfaction.

Not every house that Jack built look so great but I always encourage tenants who want to build their own house to do so because it is the greatest thing! Back when I was a wee noob, I built my own kind of Greek/Mexican/adobe/sort of house on an account that doesn't exist any more. It was inspired by Garth Fairchang's mini Greek villa in part, with stairs on the side and roof life as part of the conception. (Recently I noted to Nomad's owner, who put his forest house on sale at half price at The Outlet, that the reason the stairs were on the outside of the building of his virtual house -- as they were on nearly ever real house I ever lived in Upstate for the first 18 years of my life -- was so that the owners could rent out the top half to someone who would want their own entrance, because nobody could afford the mortgage or taxes on their own. He instantly agreed although I don't think he's from Upstate.) And pretty soon renting houses became more interesting to me than building them.

I gave up house building after a protracted session where Builder Bob -- remember him? -- tried to teach me how to build using basic sort of building block concepts even simpler than Ivory Tower of Prims, which I always found too wonky, confusing, and unsatisfactory -- and still do.

So...I started my own rectangular house with a long deck. I left the plywood out on the lawn for weeks (it's still in inventory somewhere), and then suddenly had an epiphany about how annoying that was to other people. I was mortified and covered in shame. I just hadn't thought....And that's how you understand there are only two kinds of people in SL, those who are ashamed they have blighted the view with their untextured plywood for weeks on end, and those who don't care, and leave it out for even 16 years if they feel like it.

Like that Amazon guy who was given an industry free account -- I swear to God there had to have been such a program and that's why there are so many odd 512s and 1024s with ugly unfinished builds on them -- but this time, I know the guy, have met him in RL, and even talk to him now and then on Facebook. At what point can I ask him to come inworld, where he has not logged on for years, and remove that neon glowing hulk behind my rentals in Moraine? When is the RIGHT time to have that conversation? I haven't found it in the last few years. He's a fairly big deal; I don't want Industry Guys to be discouraged by Net Nannies in a virtual world; he is free to do WTF he wants on his land, of course, WTF. This is a sacred Linden-endowed inalienable right...So....

That's part of why I like it when someone not only builds their own house, but builds a GOOD house, like this one also in the Zoe area, though not sure if it is the same guy as the one in 2015 but it looks like a similar parcel, I'm too tired now to give it the proper geolocation shakedown.

This builder is not some prim purist; he has mesh furniture inside but I think the exterior is all hand built prims that possibly he meshified, but maybe not. It's his name as the author and owner both.

Lovely, clean design and textures and building with the site as it is, without overstuffing it with mesh terrain stuff. I actually don't always like those big-deal kick-ass landscapers nowadays that lard up lots with all kinds of underpinnings to hide the ancient Mainland textures -- because so many people don't like them. I liked them and still do and have always been part of the "build with the land" movement. If the Lindens hand you a baked-in lump on your Mainland which only terraforms up or down 4+/-, then you build with it, as we did for example in Brown where terraforming is turned off.

Fly out and see this beauty in the Zoe and Clementina area, and while you're there, if your wings are not too tired, stop and see Areal Loonie's memorial put up by his girlfriend DrFran who mourns him. There was a lot said about this on Twitter already and better photos so I won't digress on this - just go and see right away because his tier was likely only paid up to X date before he died....

Do not ask for the SLURL because I didn't capture it nor would I invite even 10 people who might read this to glom on to the guy. Part of the charm is to go out there and visit the old Clementina Park, Ivory Tower if you must (I never do for all kinds of reasons), and old/new skilled builds like this.

Isabelle Charen and Hamlet Au Very Gingerly Take Up the Topic of Grossly Distorted Women's Bodies in SL

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Thesis:

The wild distortion of bodies in SL is a form of violence against women, especially pernicious as it hides behind the popular causes of body-positivism and transgenderism. If women commit this violence against themselves, assenting to, or even reveling in grotesquely huge or scratched and bleeding and bruised skins, that doesn't legitimize it.

Note: in SL, as in RL, the taking of photos of people without their permission is not the violation of any RL law or SL TOS. If you don't want to be blogged about as you strut your stuff at a public event, don't strut your stuff. The end. Banning me from a sim or event because you don't like the pictures of yourself or your client  -- or what is said about them -- won't leverage your power and ensure the persistence of only docile -- nay, slave-like bloggers-cum-PR agents -- there will be another one like me along in a minute. Give it up. Public discussions with illustrations are needed in a liberal democratic society.

So SHamlet, as I've long called him, has a  YouTube show now with Isabelle Cheren, who is a great tweeter and vlogger (you must see her character Auntie Va Gina). As many of you know, I hold nothing but disdain for Hamlet nee Linden Au (read the note at the end if you need the back story*).

Still, it's a "moment" when something historically interesting happened today. For the first time that I can recall (you'll correct me), the essential problem of horrid BODY DISTORTION -- dysmorphia, if you will -- in SL was raised by our public figures -- to be sure, very gingerly, very PC, with plenty of caveats to avoid the haters -- and certainly not deeply in the way I know Isabelle could do this, were she on her own blog solely (but yeah, they all worry about Monetarization...) -- but still....

So let's dig in, shall we?

Last week, SHamlet decided to publish Cajsa Lilliehook's "Bingo Card" on SL Photos on Flickr.

Casja titles her post "SL Flickr Always Showing You The Same Tired Tropes? Play Cliché Bingo!" -- as if the issue is repetitive photo work (she's an expert on SL photos and an artistic photographer herself) -- which side-steps the real roots of the issue, but still...

It hardly got noticed or got a comment -- except for a few giggly notes that yeah, short arms, LOL. Now Cheren will give it more boost.

Time to Poke the Flickeristas

This intervention may have become more possible when SL Flickr is at an all-time historical low and there's less liklihood of backlash -- thousands of SL residents left Flickr for Twitter or other services when Flickr decided earlier this year that all adult content even broadly understood (nude SL avatars) could only be published by paid accounts. Most SL people, even top designers, do not pay for their Flickrs, and Flickr itself always has a message urging you to "show your thanks" by buying them the premium Flickr. 

So the Flickr photogs have scattered, and now their works sometimes show up under low-follow accounts with "content warning" covers on Twitter and now Mastadon, but they have reduced their "reach" considerably. Therefore, time to take a poke.

Flickr is where you see some very good stuff, but also a lot of appalling dreck -- just like all SL fashion and art. SL and all its related social media venues of course is the very embodiment of a concept you don't hear about any more called "the long tail".

Flickr is where you learn that girl haranguing you on the forums is likely a boy in RL, because she has nothing but photo after photo of herself giving blow jobs to various over-endowed males. It's really not artistic, hon. It's not even good porn. Ladies, I think we can agree that focusing ONLY on dicks is something that generally girls don't do in their photos and SL in general. Argue you it as much as you like -- I know.

OH, and before we get any further on this -- and yes, wait for my next blog called "On Transgender" -- we'll note that yes, I'm a dumpy, overweight ugly old lady in RL, too -- gosh, like some of these distorted avatars! But no, I'm not "jealous" or "self-hating".  Are you? Did you ever endure shit like this in SL? 

(The invasion of Twitter by SL Flickeristas was part of the backdrop for the great Contraption Beat-Down this past summer -- which I blogged extensively but which still awaits that shorter, thoughtful round-up blog you really need to understand that it's not about me or even Walton or even anti-rez scripts or even his foul-mouthed mean-ass posse -- it's about the highly-rigid class and rewards structure of our virtual society and what powers are exerted to maintain it this way. And as you know, I'm not a Marxist about these things. If you missed all this, scroll back on my old blog posts, but this one tweet really sums up a lot of the brutal, inane, schoolyard violence of Second Life, if you ask me.)

So in general, the Flickeristas of SL are feeling vulnerable, having lost their prime venue for their works (and what a shame, too -- I stopped going because I didn't want to pay any more, either, without all of them, and now I have run out of photo space) -- and they still haven't really adjusted to Twitter -- and now about half a year after their exodus, Twitter has turned into a raging dumpster fire in Bayonne, NJ which the cops have been bribed by City Hall to ignore.

So...Cajsa -- and SHamlet -- have cast the BODY DISTORTION ISSUE OF SL as a "boring photos" problem. Like, it's ok to have some photos with "dicks as big as a horse". Or it's ok to have a few photos with "children's eyes and faces put on adult bodies" for...some redeeming reason we haven't quite learned yet, but let's say it exists. It's merely a photographic staging problem -- not anything deeper. It's even ok -- more than ok, let's be proud, ladies -- to have YUGE T&A in SL. Certainly, it is!

But...but...some of it is kind of icky and gross, they imply.

Well, I suppose we should accept any legitimization of this topic in any form, since the standard response is:

o It can't be put on the forums, those threads will be deleted or the person raising questions about these outrageously ugly grossly fat and overendowed women in SL must be misogynist, or anti-trans, or a Rethuglican, or worse, a genocidaire of one kind or another. 

o You can't put it on your blog outside SL in any form -- see above, you will be mobbed and hated and cancelled.

And now...

o the problem of too-short hands that couldn't reach around and wipe even a modest ass is a far more troublesome problem! Yay! Strawberry Linden -- who established what we might call the Ass Wipe Arm Measurement Standard for SL, fretted recently that a video she posted with herself and others doing a lovely dance highlighted some issue of a too-small head or a too-short arm. Nobody noticed it but her and 3 of her girlfriends. Meanwhile, this "flaw" will be allowed for ever and ever, amen, to wipe out the real problem of slices, cuts, and bruises on women's bodies in SL and the demands for, and uses of, exaggerated demeaningly fat bodies for women. Hello, avatar!

Squishy Thighs

o Example: recently, when I verrrry cautiously raised the issue of the "squishy thighs" (as they are euphemistically called) being suddenly "everywhere" and wondered "how did that happen" -- I wanted to understand the technical and social dynamics -- I got glared at and stomped on and unfollowed recently. These aren't garters, ladies and gents. These are binders that maim and kill.

Even though it ought to be disturbing that suddenly, thousands of virtual women are binding their upper thighs to the point of painful indentation and harm (if done in RL) as a "fashion".

So the way it works with these bodies, from what I can tell, is one of the makers, like Reborne, will make a thing, and then the others copy it. Not literally Copybot it, although that can happen of course, but they are "inspired" to make similar products.  Or (if I understand correctly), there are some creators who make a thing like such thighs as body parts that is sold as a feature to body makers (or maybe not, but they spread like kudzu). 

Hence the season's tortures (or delights) for bodies just in time for Halloween: thighs squished tight even to the point of bloodlessness and even with barbed wire and blood  -- by contrast in time for overstuffing at Thanksgiving -- rounded bellies and "love handles" tacked on to normally super-model-slim mesh bodies (if they aren't the dysmorphic bodies in the first place, in which case they don't need "love handles".

Kardashian on Steroids?

Some fashion analysts trace the grotesquely fat women of SL to the Kupra body, in which a sort of Kardashian on steroids, or a Brazilian bombshell, was to be the ideal -- a pretty face with normal features, long hair sometimes put up in a bun, and then GIGANTIC hips and buttocks. The look is "She has such a pretty face, too bad..." of the type of comment that singer Chrissy Metz heard all her life, providing fodder for endless magazine articles about her attempts to diet.

But Kupra was hardly the first big fat lady body of SL and hardly the only one now. Those of us who go back to the time when there were only system bodies and clothes and sliders know that there were always a few griefers in particular, and possibly a few genuine transgender kink types, who made grotesquely fat women's bodies "for fun" and waddled around even poking people with their giant attributes.

 

Big doesn't have to be ugly -- and can be beautiful -- when there is attention to line and proportion

Strained, Chaste Discussion

Isabelle and SHamlet go through a very strained, very chaste discussion of these tortured bodies of SL. They genuflect to the four compass points as one does -- they opine that perhaps they're just people expressing themselves -- which, they hasten to assure us -- they surely have the right to do in a virtual world. (And Isabelle, not surprisingly, served up more of that line to me later on Twitter.)

But then there's that troubling tendency -- which has become a tidal wave recently, making this past Halloween the absolute goriest in SL history -- of bleeding, scratched, bruised, damaged skin -- not just a red hand imprint on buttocks, not just a winsome scratch "that embellishes an empty face" (as Gorky said in My Childhood about Russian violence, domestic and public, in general). No, these are tears, rips, gaps, horrors -- mutilation. Like the photos of RL people I have seen or met who have gone through Russian filtration camps, in the Chechen, Syrian, and Ukrainian wars. That's why I think such things should never be played with.

And why you will never see me going to bid for Patch Linden to be sprung from "jail". The RL father of my RL children spent 9 years in the GULAG and his brother and grandfather perished there, along with friends and colleagues. It's not something you play with. But that's just me. For most people in SL, Gorky works find. Slashes and bites and blood are fashion and liven up a dull virtual world -- which always has more reality than humankind can bear.

This isn't in the bedroom -- this is a public figure at a public event, setting the tone. So I say, "Look at yourselves. What the HELL are you doing?!"

This troubles the bien pensant SHamlet -- he'll excuse and applaud BDSM but not THAT much of a public display of disaffection -- but then comes the "uncomfortable"  silence -- and mention of "that issue," as these two very vaguely reference what is in turn euphemistically called "age play" in SL but which in fact is child pornography, and banned by the Lindens because in many RL jurisdictions it is a crime.

Still, can you be sure? Wouldn't want to step on anyone's self expression! The tap-dance done here is fascinating -- and again -- on her own, Isabelle would be more frank, but there you are -- the price of getting 2,800 subscriptions -- which is huge for an SL vlogger -- is precisely that. You do watch what you say. She claims not, of course in this discussion which hinges on the liberal premise that you can always impugn to another human being engaged in some awful act some sort of rationale that would be justifiable. Well, no. You don't. Putin had an unhappy childhood but that doesn't justify mass murder.

"I Like to Jiggle Jiggle"

At one point I was making a folder of these grotesque body distorted women of SL but I can't find it now -- and for more biting satire around them than I can deliver, go and see Naria Panther -- in this case, 13:40 for example. She simply goes to the latest merchant event and pans her camera around. These aren't exceptions or freaks. We've all seen them many times. I have had the precise same experiences, as we all have, looking in horrid fascination as an amply-endowed lady-love jiggles to a halt in front of a display she wants to examine -- and then keeps jiggling and jiggling, way past the sell-by date, and way past anything like RL atall.

The racks on these babes would deserve their own zip code -- if their ass cheeks hadn't been gerrymanded ahead of time to get their own damn county. One wonders -- delicately -- how they, er, do it, without creating all kinds of rendering and eclipsing issues for the SL engine. BTW, if you want to see SL porn done properly, with all the technical issues studied and generally solved, at least with slender bodies, you can join the group Black.Sand furniture group (the guy is Russian, and for him it is the каракум) and see the link to Google docs in his latest notice.

But Are They Really Like That?

Big bosom, sure -- but not grotesque. And thighs are adorned, not squished. It can be done, ladies!

I decided to just take a quick tour around the main events this evening -- although most of them opened yesterday or a few days ago and have now utterly emptied out, their cam sims utterly useless. THAT is the state of the SL economy and the product of an excessive proliferation of events. Still, there's a few points that can be observed:

o Fashion, you know? An angular dress can be very bizarre or extreme in Paris, but by the time it gets to Schenectady's dress-makers, it will be rather dumbed down and softened. And just because creators MAKE these hideous get-ups,  with photos of the stupidest-looking models they can find, doesn't mean people buy them or wear them -- or if they do, wear them all the time. If they're on mod, they might revise them. So it's hard to know how prevelant this FASHION is in actual USE without real sociological study;

o If you take the top "Big Girls" event (didn't it used to be called THICC? that's the word used for this style anyway) -- you realize that as in the cover picture of the event, large does not mean ugly or distorted. These are beautiful bodies, in proportion, or even if not in proportion exactly, still done esthetically. Esthetics do matter, and there are universal notions of what constitutes aesthetical lines, even if they can differ from culture to culture. Harmony. Balance. Restraint. You can do "big" or "busty" without being an atrocity. In fact, I noticed (I'd never gone to this event), most of the wares on sale were not even as "large" as in the cover photo. They were merely what you might call "curvy".

So to be clear here, Big Girls and the kind of bodies and outfits at this event is NOT what I mean -- or most people would mean -- by "body distortion" in SL.

This is more what we mean by "body distortion" in every way:

Is this what we mean by "distorted"? Well, for some, here, yes. Notice the men aren't distorted; the women are! Still, that's not what most people gawk at, except for good reasons.

o So, in short, where you see the big bums in particular, they aren't THAT big as the extremes that Panther found -- or that I've seen over the years and that seem to stand out. That is, if you just look at the events, what they offer, and the people who go to them, you see there is a LOT LESS body distortion in SL than you might have thought. To be sure, there is still SOME -- and I see it around at other types of events or among my tenants (although not at art gallery openings and not at the top-spending level of tenant). Yes, I correlate outrageous body distortions with the poor, for all kinds of reasons, in my observation. Again, argue if you like on principal -- but you haven't seen thousands upon thousands of tenants, and I have.

YET IT IS STILL PREVELANT ENOUGH TO SPREAD AND DEMAND JUSTIFICATION -- WHICH IT SHOULD NOT.

o Occasionally, you could even find that the "bruised and battered" look isn't meant to mean "BDSM" or "domestic violence victim" but "girl who clambered up a mountain and maybe scraped her knees". Like this person:

Not, like the grotesque character at 10:18 on Panthar's video -- grotesque mainly because of her dreadful jiggling.

Does that mean that Panthar is lying? Cherry-picking? Distorting herself? No, she's reporting the truth of the situation -- there is more and more grotesqueness out there. But there are distinctions and the top designers and their customers make them -- fortunately for the aesthetics of SL.

Another example of a person who emphasized her butt and put on garters -- but not to the point of pain and distraction.

That doesn't excuse the enormous amount of fashion AND use of damage that I see all over SL -- it's a culture indeed of sadism and masochism in every way. Virtuality amplifies and rewards this. That's why I worry deeply.

(No, I don't agree with you that BDSM is just a "lifestyle" -- I think it's an aggressive dysfunction that does not keep to its own supposed rules of consent whatsoever and has bled out extensively into the public square. At the level of my rentals, I accept that BDSM is a choice for the bedroom, and I'm colour-blind, and don't "go there" because I believe strenuously in privacy and tolerance and pluralism (as distinct from an endless parade of belligerent diversities). But as a choice for society to tolerate, I reject BDSM. I don't like it when people go into events with their clanking chains (often in the form of pixels, but still), with degraded slaves crawling behind them. It's simply wrong. The extraordinary number of "safe houses" for subs lets you know that.)

o It's also important to note that body dysmorphia and BDSM are intertwined but not coterminous. And that's helpful to understand when thinking about this problem -- which, BTW, there is little you can do about in a world for adults, but it is an issue you can discuss and guide your children on. 

So on moral grounds, even by their ultra-liberal lights, the Lindens should ban "Capture Roleplay" sites. On technical grounds they can't, having once accepted that BDSM as a category can be tolerated as "adult". If they got into adjudicating what is "Capture Roleplay" and what is "BDSM," even if making a public/private distinction, they would be endlessly parsing badly-filled out ARs or their own grainy screenshots. They won't be doing that.

All children go through stages of hatred and dislike of their bodies, and other children sadly help them to suffer in these stages. Like Kimmie Dawson, quoting her late friend Genevive:

She said 'I like giants
Especially girl giants
'Cause all girls feel too big sometimes
Regardless of their size'

I don't  believe the cure for these childhood woes that persist into adulthood is grotesquerie in the public square of SL as a normalizing phenomenon. Sometimes it's good to leave things as an aesthetic and moral issue, realizing you can't legislate around it. In fact, when you can't legislate, or shouldn't legislation because of "too blunt an axe," that's all the more reason to take a moral stance and condemn it. And so I do.

The wild distortion of bodies in SL is a form of violence against women, especially pernicious as it hides behind the popular causes of body-positivism and transgenderism. If women commit this violence against themselves, assenting or reveling in grotesquely huge or scratched and bleeding and bruised skins, that doesn't legitimize it.

My conclusion from years of observation of this issue is there are three reasons for the grotesque distortion of women's bodies in SL -- ranging in degree of prevalence:

1. Women wear exaggerated bodies and outfits of this nature because men like it, or they think men like it.  They do it sometimes happily, and over-do it -- they do it under pressure. But the source of their doing this is not in their own hearts, except in the sense of neediness. Here's a so-very-SL scene -- the girl is stark naked in a large public event, standing close in front of her boyfriend who is gazing at her, oblivious of other males -- or females -- ogling here -- with the tell-tale tag of a "demo". She's trying on a body or body part or skin or whatever for his approval.
   
   
   
   Yes, it's simply a Thanksgiving weekend shopping outing for this loving couple. But could you think about it, please.
   
   
   
   "How about squishy, but not TOO squishy, hon, ok?"
   
   
   Yes, there are men who like such grossly distorted bodies, especially huge asses -- everybody remembers the song "Baby Got Back". And no, this isn't just a Black cultural issue, because dysmorphic bodies in SL range in races and don't seem over-represented to any one.
   
   
2. Some trans women adopt the exaggerated, heavily sexually endowed and provocative look as part of their transition in RL or their choice in SL. I don't perceive transgenderism as RP. The RP of transgenderism isn't necessarily the same thing as the drag queen but these are separate issues. Some feminists that are labelled as TERFS call this a "kink" -- like the RL shop teacher who insisted on coming to class with giant boobs and gained the right to do this in her school (I just hope her boobs don't get caught in a lathe). When observing types who do this, sometimes among tenants, I'm kind of amazed that they don't seem concerned at all about how they are perceived by others -- and are oblivious, if not defiant. My own conviction is that this form of virtual transgenderism, whether by RL transgender people or SL aspiring transgender people or just jokesters is not rooted in actual kindness to biological women. There is a certain hatred that comes out that is a dynamic involving shocking and inciting others, so that they then disdain or even hate this distorted female body. I don't think there's necessarily anything "healthy" here -- I think the desire to distort the female body outrageously is a dysfunction and it's fine to question it. 
   
   Of course, we're not supposed to question it -- which is why SHamlet weighing in on this topic -- during the week of the aftermath of the Club Q massacre -- is interesting. The Lindens and their hangers-on are always hoping to "clean up" SL and "manage" the "adult content". To what end? A sale? Of course, Casja's Bingo Card was published on November 17, days before the Club Q massacre. That's not the point; the point all these issues are coming together everywhere, and they had a felt need to air them.
   
   3. Finally, some women with huge bodies in SL have them in RL and want to "be themselves" and "be body-positive" and "overcome stereotypes". And more power to them. I notice that most of the women who do this do not hideously distort; they just have large or even obese bodies, but their ass doesn't stick out from here to Nebraska, you know? Their boobs don't poke your eye out in revenge. That's the thing. You really can feel the difference.
   
   
   
   
   Bodies that tile the female form unnaturally so it can be more accessible to males are troubling, but it's all too common in RL and SL.
   
   So...stop here for a minute. The greatest form of distortion in SL is precisely the gigantism of the buttocks, and secondarily, the breasts -- often the breasts are made childishly small by comparison to the enormous ass for contrast. Of course, this position is associated with men simply banging a broad, like an animal, not seeing their faces or interacting with any other part of them, as distinct from laying on top of them, gazing into their face, and asking them what they would like. And on the Bingo card, this holds only one delicately phrased box: "implausibly big hips and thighs".
   
   No, Casja. They aren't just "implausible" -- they are hideously huge. And they aren't just the hips and thighs -- they are the buttocks. Putting a square "ASS CHEEKS" in all caps doesn't convey that these are GROSSLY DISTORTED -- it conveys merely that they are shown -- like the "camel toes" and the men's "packages". (A term SHamlet uses several times in the show).
   
   I don't think there's anything to celebrate with no. 2 as there is with no. 3, but sexual preference isn't something you can dictate or change -- whatever cultural factors go into shaping it, there's inherency in gender and preferences for gender, in my view. Prosecuting some elements of it, regarding children and enslavement and brutality in particular, but it's hard to change. In our virtual world, the fact that SHamlet and Isabelle have now set the bien pensant tone for this as being "disturbing" when it involves "printing children's faces on adult bodies" and "painful" when involving "squishy thighs" -- and merely deserving of derision in horse penises -- and particularly troubling when it comes to gashes and bruises. They hypothesize for a minute that some women appearing in SL all battered and blue maybe "working out issues" or something but I'm not buying that.
   
   As one of my blog commentators famously said about my discussion of the child avatars "working out issues of abuse" by making their child avatars subject to simulated virtual abuse: "What's in it for Daddy?" Why is he being ever-so-helpful in putting this "child" partner through their humiliation? Indeed.
   
   Shamlet and Charen staking a little bit of a claim on this subject is welcome. Yes, it's partial and needs to go further -- but ultimately it isn't going to change anything for the masses. Still, you can be sure that certain mavens on the talk show and art gallery and Linden office hour circuit are going to slightly adjust their wardrobes and maybe heal up some of those many bruises and scratches. The gauntlet has been thrown down.
   
   PS: You can also be sure that a certain number of gals will come in and now and "set me straight" with defiant millennial or Gen X or Gen Y "gurl power" that their mutilation is a form of glory. I just don't get it, they'll say! 
   
   To which I can say: how come the men aren't scratched and beaten and bruised? Huh? How's that for a question. And PPS -- sometimes, not often,  you will see men, too -- especially Black men -- with these "adornments" which also bears pondering.
   
   Will the Lindens change their TOS to forbid mutilated skins? Of course not. They'll invoke zombies and aliens and war sim RPs. They'll invoke whatever they need to invoke to keep this particularly high-paying constituency. I have AR'd some of the most hideous Halloween gore bodies and skins and outfits -- to no avail. And how could there be any reaction when the Lindens own haunted house contains a pick-up truck with mutilated dead bodies in it? For me, it's a pick-up truck nearly identical to a photo I wrote about from the RL Battle of Ilovaisk, which is why I never go to the Linden's haunted house every year. They never take that monstrosity down. 
   
   I realize that I haven't been able to illustrate this post with the really most grotesque images we already all know about. That maybe I fail to make my case, and not only for that reason. The default assumption about virtual worlds is that everybody would want to be tan, fit, and 21, with maybe larger boobs or dicks than RL, but not at the grotesque and obese level we see them. Yet that is NOT what happened in the reality of our virtuality, and we need to study the three reasons I have outlined -- and others -- for an explanation.
   
   It's good to cry "Hold, enough!" in virtual worlds. And so I do.
   
   
   *I view SHamlet, who was the official Linden court blogger for too many years before he went "independent," as something of a talentless hack. Enthusiastically and uncritically blogging about the Lindens' every fabulous move in those early years was really noxious. The Alphaville Herald with its tabloid approach and biting satire was truly preferable.  I've had an ongoing critique of him for years for all his distortions and outright lies serving the Lab and the cool kids, and it's been a mystery how he makes a living (and he even has another book coming out about the Metaverse). I guess it's the speaker's fees, like with all the tech journos. I can't imagine the ads on his blog bring in much but he is popular in the way state media is with a certain SL crowd. SHamlet only benefits by bringing on Charen, who *does* have talent and a following, but of course he'd bring on a white girl who isn't going to be too critical of the Lab, and not one of the numerous kick-ass Black bloggers on YouTube who don't even get a mention even when the Lab itself features them. 

   Does this sound mean? Then you don't know the history of SL or his completely self-serving and disingenuous interview of me, calling me a "Noam Chomsky" (!) merely because I criticized LL and its favourites and tech in general -- which wasn't popular 18 years ago as it is now! This summaries up the whole thing for me: at the end of SLCC I in 2004, Philip asked everyone in the conference (perhaps 200 people?) to pose in a picture together, because he said SL was like "the dawning of the Internet," that the "whole new world" of the Metaverse was something we would all look back on as being founded then. This is where I BOLTED from the room. It was a crazy instinctive thing. By that point it wasn't just that I myself had suffered in SL and been targeted for all kinds of hate campaigns, including by Lindens (yes, by Lindens), it was that I was watching the damaging effect on other people -- that was back when I thought I saw the future of the Internet was inside SL (not much different than Philip) and that it "had to be stopped" -- before I realized SL was merely a concentrated form like a magnifying glass starting a fire on a leaf -- in fact the phenomena that led to 8chan and mass school shootings wasn't just in SL, it was all over the Internet. More on that another time.

   So as I RAN from this room -- I valued SL, and I appreciated Philip, but I didn't want to be in the "Founding Fathers" photo and take responsibility historically. So...who should I meet rushing in the other direction, so as not to miss the photo op? SHamlet! Of course! He couldn't BEAR to miss out -- FOMO -- and had to be present at that Founding Fathers (and to some extent Mothers) moment for "the Metaverse". Hard to remember now that we talked about "the METAAA-verse" even more and as wild-eyed and crazily then as people do now -- and we laugh at them, we jaded consumers of corporate virtuality. Too bad humdog isn't alive to see this. Or maybe not.

   I'll admit freely that I haven't followed SHamlet too closely in the last few years because it seems to me he put his blog kind of on autopilot with re-pasted forums posts or mass media news and plenty of posts by valiant worker bees like Cajsa Lilliehook who diligently post original content for him. That's always the formula, girls!  He was ATROCIOUS on the gatcha issue as I noted, unnecessary amplifying a lawyer who was entirely doing the Lab's bidding instead of challenging them.
   
   And here's all you need to know about SHamlet: because I have had a long-standing criticism of him (such as this post about his economic favouritism or this critique of his reporting on skins for minorities or this left-handed praise ), which began with his mocking interview of me, he devised a policy for his comments section that would ONLY apply to me. If I ever commented on any of his posts on New World Notes, I would have to put my RL name in full. I couldn't use my avatar name. No one else had to suffer that sort of exposure to harassment that comes with giving your RL name around virtual world types  -- only me. That is, he wouldn't bar my posts on grounds of obscenity, or trolling, even as tendentiously understood in those circles, because it wouldn't be there. That's the thing. He would instead force exposure of RL on me -- to the legions of griefers showing up in his comments (more then than now) to harass and bully me further in RL and SL -- just to make a criticism of him. That's despicable and can't be justified in any way, and the more discriminating leading lights of SL get that. 

Contrary to Contraption

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Ezekiel at Bassett Town 2022

MY GREAT ADMIRATION FOR CONTRAPTION

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

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

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

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

MY RESISTANCE AGAINST EXTREMISTS WHO INVADE THE PUBLIC SQUARE

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

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

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

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

THE TABLEAUX

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

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

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

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

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

BASSETT TOWN

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

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

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

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

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

FRACTURED FAIRY-TALE

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Walton Wainwright (@SLContraption) July 6, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROAD RAGE

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

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

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

SIMPLIFIED PACKAGING

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

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

NEVER CHALLENGE YOUR BETTERS

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

WALTON IS KING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONDESCENSION

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

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

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

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

CLASS WARFARE

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

I wish we were.

We are not.

It is class warfare.

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

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

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

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

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

FACT-CHECKING

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

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

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

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

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

SIDETRACK ON MESH BOUNCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a screenshot. 

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

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

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

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

Well, we're not all in this together.

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

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

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

WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE WITH NO TALENT?

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

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

And there is a huge gulf between you and us.

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

And here's why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CLIENT IS IN THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY

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

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

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

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

COPYBOT IS NOT UBIQUITOUS ALTHOUGH YOU THEORIZE AS IF IT IS

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

ARE THE BOTS BACK IN THE BOX?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CREATIONS FROM 'INSPIRATION'

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

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

Is this about Copybot and your browbeat about its irrationality?

No.

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

So there's another thing she will do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMMON COURTESY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Haha BellaRose Ejects Me From Her $800 Group Because I Told the Truth About Her Terrible Customer Service

First, Bella banned me for accidentally going into her building lair -- which was merely a function of clicking on a link in chat after crashing. The link from a product sale leads to her boxes of stuff in the sky or something and so I went there by accident. I've done that before with other merchants which has taught me that the URL with the sale is usually NOT one to use but given how LOUSY her landmarks are and OUT OF DATE as I have written, I clicked on one of those just to get at least on her sim near her store.

So after getting unbanned from that stupid debacle, I am then expelled from her group merely for telling the truth about how she hides the group gifts and how her landmarks are out of date. 

Oh, and how it's still Christmas in February.

She didn't ban me from her sim, though chuckles.

Why? Because she thinks I will go on buying her incredibly expensive stuff even without being in her overpriced VIP group.

I think she'll find I've done enough buying of her expensive stuff : )

I bought a $5000 house that had a VIP group discount but then after IM'ing her to get the discounted bed that came with it, I just never heard back.

She is TERRIBLE at customer service BECAUSE SHE CAN BE.

She knows she will still keep her ferocious fangirlz in the group who bat aside anyone who complains -- it's a "type" all too familiar from SL.