Second Thoughts

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

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy SL20B!

Prokofy Neva, Curator

Content and Discontent, Richness and Sadness

Prelude
Content/Discontent

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

Content/Discontent

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

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

You get the idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their loudest complaint is:

"This isn't like RL."

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

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

"This is TOO MUCH like RL."

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

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

***

Act 1, Scene 1
Prim Hoarders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress.

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

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

Be grateful.

***

Act 1, Scene 2
Magic Wand vs. Griefcube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Act 1, Scene 3
Griefer U

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It just takes a long time.

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

***

Act 1, Scene 4
Ad Farmers

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

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

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

: (

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Act 2, Scene 1
The Pizza Guy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Someone will make everything."

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

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

***

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

Act 2, Scene 2
Group Tools Reform

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

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

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

Discord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Act 2, Scene 3
Mentors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can't anyone HELP??!

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

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

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

Look it up.

***

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

***

Act 3, Scene 1
Telehubs>>p2p

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Act 3, Scene 2
Copybot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Act 3, Scene 3
Welcome Areas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our advice is to never touch that button.

[Linden Lags Tshirt]

***

Act 3, Scene 4
FIX SEARCH

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

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

FIND

And you did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING?

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

LOL

Although first, leave a notecard.

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

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

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

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

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

o the strangulation of the Mainland in various ways;

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

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

***

Act 4, Scene 2
GachaPWND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For how long?

***

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

This vignette doesn't need much explication.

The yellow ban lines, blocking your view.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's all that's about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Act 5, Scene 1
The Future is NOW

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

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

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

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

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

And more importantly, this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the old END anti-nuclear slogan said:

PROTEST AND SURVIVE!

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

I always have.

END

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.

News from Ravenglass Rentals & Happy Valentine's Day

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Pick up the notecards with complete list of landmarks at the Ravenglass Rentals Main Office in Maryport

Good morning!

Come and get the Latest Listings at our office and be sure to click on the Portals board to see a hall of TP boards to some themed locations.

I started a listing of B&B + Skybox and other Sky Home locations which you can use for a Valentine's outing -- pick this up at the platforms to your right from the landing. Lots of great deals, $50/75 to $150/200 for furnished room and private skybox in all styles.

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o Moraine B&B + Skybox is near the river and Moraine Moor. Visit the villa and Narnia Quest across the river in Winnipeg and the Society for Virtual Architecture in Warmouth.

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$100/150. The Etomologist. Sari Sari My Winter Attic with outdoor patio

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$150/200. The Artist with C&C Lacrimosa Skybox including hidden basement.

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$50/75. The Collector with Bueno Before Dusk + Scene Changer

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$150/200. The Poet with [ba] Stockholm skybox

o Shaman's Bluff
Land at the tidal flats by the waterfalls and go up to your antique or nature skybox.

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$162/250 Maya's Cottage in the forest

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$100/150 cinphul's Isabelle space skybox

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$100/150. Concept's Nature skybox

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$150/200 prims. Desmond Shang's Naturalist house.

Also check out Shaman's Hollow, under construction but some are finished.

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o Hite

A Mainland island with sea views and boating in the Hidden Lakes area.

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$50/75 Pixel Mode's Artist's Studio

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$100/150 West Village Belgravia skybox by Apple Fall

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$100/150. Kraftwork Daylight skybox

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$100/150. Minimal Cute Apartment

Check back at the Main Office for regularly updated lists.

 

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All of our rentals are refundable, and if you rent again at another one of our locations, the cancellation fee is returned. So hop around and check them all out.

Also check out the SL Public Land Preserve with numerous locations to hang out and various things to do from boating to games to quests.

MORTE GRAS, a merchant event and hunt organized by Mieville, is open now until Feb. 28. I have a cart there with Swamp Water & Beignets and also there's a hunt prize at my store.

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1. A reminder of basic facts in our rentals:

o No security orbs are allowed on the ground, period. If you set the white lists to our managers, we still find them. You have ban/eject powers in the group once you switch to "resident" status and "avatars can see me" turned off on the parcel -- ask if you don't see this. You can place security in skyboxes only at 500 m2 or higher for the periphery of the skybox.

o Check the group for your location as Ravenglass Rentals is the right group only for some of them - we have a dozen other groups so that they are manageable. The group joiners are usually on site at the rental unit and at a landing point or hangout/office nearby.

o Occasionally you will see a parcel for rent AND sale; if you rent such a parcel IM me to have it moved into a rentals group. They have no autoreturn on them if you want to get started and the correct rentals group will be indicated on the info card in the rental box. In the rare event that land is sold before you reach us, of course you will get a full refund. We don't like to have land with dual status for precisely that reason, but it is a way to have a parcel show on the map as well as a way to compensate for inadequate search functions.

CORSICA SOUTH COAST
2. Here's a new rental in Corsica Coast South, an artists' community which we support with some of our locations. Place your own home.

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$270/528 prims RENTED

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$180/350

MORAINE MOOR
2. Some parcels opened up on Moraine Moor which is a great deal. Use our Craftsman homes or place your own.

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$460/766 prims

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$315/525 prims

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$325/528

CAR LOT
3. A famous landmark roadside on the Ravenglass sim is Bonecrusher Slate's car lot. He was my first customer when I opened in 2004 and I really appreciated his business. But since he hasn't logged on in 18 years -- unlike me, who logs on every day! -- it's time to move on. If you have never purchased a high-prim $400 vintage vehicle, better hurry!

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I am looking for a tenant for that lot, preferably a vehicle maker with a freebie. It will remain as a place to rez cars.

GREEK VILLAS
4. Greek Villas on the Linden sea with icebergs, sail your boats. Management homes do not count on your count and are not replaceable.

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$150/200 8f8 primavera in Tuscana

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$200/200 prims. Fully furnished villa by Loren Home Creations

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$225/300. Villa by Loren Home Creations. Sim corner.

Note: read the land descriptions. Some areas are themed communities and homes cannot be replaced, but we have many areas where you can place your own home and ask to remove ours.

Prokofy Neva
Owner & Manager
Ravenglass Rentals

Failed Linden Mainland Experiments Over the Years - UPDATED

Riderless pod spamming a Heterocera sim.

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is some history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

GTFO Strikes Back

Prokofy Neva, Virtualator

This is from 2019 and still relevant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Vega Firelyte

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

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

Theresa says:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Vega makes this intervention:

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

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

My comment:

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

Vega claims:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ask:

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

Vega says:

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

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

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

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

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

Vega replies:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I reply:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I go to the next steps.

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

o Constant publication of bad behavior

o Continued ARS, urging all those affected to AR.

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

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

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

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

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

On Leaving Linden Road Community Group - UPDATE

This group really doesn't do much. Population, 171, with quite a few who have not logged in since 2018 or 2019. I joined it because in principle I support any Mainland effort. Although some of the efforts of this group really go astray (obsession with spam pods). There's another group with the promising sounding name "Vivid Route Initiative" run by Reklame, whose name means "advertisement" in German, Russian and other languages. Here, the "vivid" has really gone astray. It's not the $77 charge to join (I'm not going to burn $77 on this and see how many members there are. And you will never convince me, for example, that Abner Mole's ugly black obelisks telling you to be a good neighbour, which Reklame spams everywhere on microparcels are effective at all -- I know they merely cause people not to rent my land when they sprout next to me. Maybe that's their ultimate purpose. Abner Mole is listed as the creator -- I can't be sure the texture on this obelisk is his, or if he supports spamming micro-parcels with it (likely not). I see various Mole fanbois like Evola Courtois love it. And Reklame of course, whose role in SL is opaque to me. His profile says "Vita secunda praeconium est," a made-up Latin phrase which I guess means "Second Life is advertising". And "Vita ludus non est" ("Life is not a game", something I'm not sure the ancient Romans said. I do stand corrected on a previous attribution I printed here, which is that Timo Daehlie is responsible for the ugly obelisks. He most certainly is not. He tells me that he hates the obelisks, too, and ARs them. I'm not sure how Timo's name became associated with the parcels, possibly because he bought microparcels to beautify them.

Linden Road Community has some enthusiastic supporters, although some would-be members are put off by the owner's support of Trump. That doesn't bother me; I have tenants who are Trump voters and European tenants with even worse political views; I'm a Democrat and a Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden voter, but it need not be a reason for rejecting someone in a virtual world.

BTW, I pretend little different re: membership log-ins with my older group, SL Public Land Preserve, population 785 (founded in 2005 by Random Unsung, my old alt), with people going back to 2006 who haven't logged on; the people from 2005 may have completely disappeared, although sometimes groups retain people who are gone from the People list. I should count the non-loggers -- they could make up as many as half. But it's ok, sometimes they come back so there's no need to boot them; after all, they paid $5 (and now $10) to join. Some have content here and there. And the main thing is that it grows every day. People are always joining, some rent, some hang out, some leave, and really, I don't ask them to do anything except follow the simple rules on the land. I give them regular group gifts and update the content frequently. Sometimes people donate tier or make areas. Every day I get cash donations at multiple sites. Not enough to pay the tier, but between the content sales, rentals, tier donations, and cash donations, a good part of the tier is covered.

As for Linden Road (which I don't view as any kind of competition and it's not about that) -- the very occasional notices mainly have to do with the owner getting hysterical about some non-event or kvetching about somebody doing something to her and explaining that she can't hold events. She's very good at making emotional YouTubes.  The latest one is a long lament about somebody with whom she had a nice conversation, but who TP'd away saying he could never get over their political differences because he couldn't support Trump. Understood. I usually can't sit still through all of these, Trump or no, pods or no -- she wasted an enormous amount of tears on the supposed demise of her beloved pods, but in fact they all were back in 2 days and it was a "misunderstanding". It's good she has a YouTube channel that has some competent videos of SL building tips and such. Maybe someone will be interested. I think making the channel "age restricted" is a bad idea and contributes to the misperception of SL, but whatever.

When Asadora had a Halloween event last year, which I took part in to be supportive (you could make your land a stop on a circuit ride), she constantly browbeat people for not taking part and wept when they didn't. I find that if people don't want to join a thing, you can't browbeat them and scold them. You're not interesting enough; try another thing. SL is like herding cats. People don't like organized activities especially if politics are involved. So it is what it is. 

Since I like the Mainland and tend to support things on there, I stayed in it, and I'm grateful for the few gifts -- although I thought it might be under the thumb of Yevad Doobie, one of those official hall monitors of SL who hates me for reasons I've forgotten or never knew (and who at first had a falling out with Asadora but I guess it was patched up) -- but probably because I criticized the pods. And with good reason. They spam up sims; nobody is ever in them; there is no reason on earth or the metaverse they can't be "rez on demand" and stop cluttering the view. Other people agree with me on this, but it's not the sort of thing we will ever get traction on because of the small coterie of pod lovers who actually don't log in much to actually ride them and are merely nostalgic about that one time in 2010 they rode one.

So I was flying around Adscita checking rentals and I got a message from Linden Roads about maps of the continents. I go to the Protected Roads Interest Group (owner Yevad Doobie)where the maps are said to be located and whoops, I'm banned. Oh well. If they're on all perms, someone will get them for me. If they aren't, I'll live.

So I spot Asadora Summers herself there who now goes by the display name "Asadorable Delightful" (...), the owner of the Linden Road Community (LRC) group there, and I IM her, and here's the conversation:

Prokofy: Oh, your lovely friend Yevad has me banned from this building so I can't get the maps. Oh, well, it's not important. This is because I rightly criticize those ridiculous pods that in fact are always empty and I have yet to see one with a person in them in years! Or...some other reason, who knows. Not important. Just thought I'd let you know.
[23:08] Inventory item 'Snapshot : Brair Rose Woods, Castaneae (68, 170, 87) - Moderate' offered
[23:08] Prokofy Neva: didn't have to wait long, here's an empty on now lol!
[23:12] Asadora Summers: Oh yeah... sorta like the sitting empty rentals you have right?
[23:12] Prokofy Neva: My empty rentals don't travel across other people's sims and spam up their view
[23:12] Prokofy Neva: bad analogy
[23:13] Asadora Summers: You have had the same argument for years and years. Obviously you don't realise that people love the pods and they actually use them. Just because you see them go by empty, doesn't mean they aren't used. You can't be on every route on all the continents to know if they are actually empty or not.
[23:13] Prokofy Neva: well they don't because...they're empty
[23:13] Asadora Summers: I have tried to be patient and understanding and defended you and frankly I'm sick of it.
[23:13] Prokofy Neva: other people who aren't in your insular coterie say the same thing
[23:13] Asadora Summers: they are not always empty!!!
[23:14] Prokofy Neva: I see them constantly empty
[23:14] Asadora Summers: You can't see every pod all the time 24/7
[23:14] Prokofy Neva: and I report this
[23:14] Prokofy Neva: the end
[23:14] Asadora Summers: Report them to whom?
[23:14] Prokofy Neva: well then they can release the statistics, but...they don't
[23:14] Prokofy Neva: to the world, so they can see how stupid this is
[23:14] Prokofy Neva: eventually the Lindens will end them
[23:14] Prokofy Neva: but you know, I don't have to be in your group. I don't even know why I am in your group.
[23:14] Asadora Summers: You have no idea that LL has given the pods the blessing and in fact are going to incorporate more yavapods
[23:15] Prokofy Neva: Um, I read the same forums as you do
[23:15] Asadora Summers: but you don't know the inside information that I do?
[23:15] Prokofy Neva: and eventually especially in Bellissaria they will get enough complaints and I won't have to be raising this topic
[23:15] Prokofy Neva: oh are you the inside dope with the inside dope? ok
[23:15] Prokofy Neva: I don't take the same weepy approach to SL that you do
[23:15] Asadora Summers: I understand you are a feeble old woman with nothing better to do than to play busy body in a virtual world
[23:16] Asadora Summers: But realise this, just as much as you hate 'all the pods' most of SL hates you.
[23:16] Prokofy Neva: um, I'm not a feeble old woman, are you? And I see you are out of arguments and have to make personal attacks
[23:16] Asadora Summers: Your IM is being held in a que. Wait time is forever.
[23:16] Prokofy Neva: um, most of SL in fact supports me OR doesn't know me, you live in deep illusion. Bye!
[23:16] Asadora Summers: Your IM is being held in a que. Wait time is forever.

Again, I think "most of SL" hasn't heard of me; if you took a vote, you'd find more supporters than detractors. Why? Because when I fly around and go to events and hear from tenants, they always say they like my posts and my blog and they think the same thing. They just don't say it because they don't want to take the hate that comes with defying the chosen ones on the forums and inworld. And I don't have any illusions that my views are "popular" -- they are controversial. But I think people appreciate that they are expressed, more than not. And in many cases agree with them.

Well, a petty mind is displayed here in this conversation, if you didn't figure that out from her YouTubes -- and since I'm not the one with a YouTube channel (I should start one someday!), do the math.

Note how this kind of low-intelligence mind works -- if I defend you, if I "do" for you, then you must defend me and "do" for me. I find that creepy.  It's one thing to have mutual aid societies and cooperation. It's another to have omerta. That someone can actually be on the Mainland as much as Asadora is and doesn't see that those pods are always empties means that there is just no hope here of getting a break-through to reality. But it's not necessary. Eventually, if the Lindens themselves don't grasp it, others will get them to see it because the pods spam up the view and don't need to be "always on". They can be rez on demand like the bubbles and the inner tubes, you know? The Moles don't send inner tubes constantly sailing across waterways; they put them at locations spaced out over sims so you can generally find one after looking for a minute. It's not rocket science.

What's also so-very-SL is that someone who doesn't share your view on something thinks that if she hasn't converted you, then bans of you should be supported. BTW she is a Trump voter who puts Trump signs on her SL lawns, but that doesn't matter -- it wasn't a reason not to join her group because I believe it's still possible to get along in SL. You don't need to agree on everything. You don't have to share RL or SL views. I don't express malice to the creator of the pods or to those who support them; I simply keep pointing out how stupid, wasteful and spammy they are. If you don't share that perception, it's not personal. And since the insiders have prevailed on this and got the ear of the Lindens -- who love load tests -- why begrudge someone their opposition? Why ban them? 

It's funny how a Trump voter ends up supporting the pods, which are essentially a socialist government-aspiring means of transportation. Trump supporters generally don't support such things. Even people like me think Amtrak should be privatized, it is run so poorly.

I don't bear malice to these groups; I think it's better if people in fact are not united and there are a variety of groups and they even take opposing sides on issues of the day. That's a much stronger civil society and democracy than just an authoritarian fan club worshiping Patch Linden and the Moles and doing what they want or their selected friends want.

Once someone engages in these kind of nasty personal attacks, however (despite not booting me from her group, so she can keep her numbers up lol and show off someone prominent), I ban them from my office or other central areas. Why have them creating trouble?

Again, my guess is that once those pods start hurdling across Belli, which actually gets some use, we may see some objections to them. I don't people will want their suburban or bucolic splendour interrupted by the Jetsons. The empty Jetsons' vehicles. In fact, if they do come to Belli, I bet they won't be able to appear as pods, which are ugly, but they'll make them other vehicles, perhaps those made by the "Bellissaria Parade" group guy, fonseca. He's very enterprising. There are enough different people in Belli that they may provide a counterweight of sorts to these forums regs and in-group FIC types that try to control things. Perhaps -- gasp! -- they may only be made rez on demand. Imagine!

I don't think Linden roads need attention or focus as the sim seam thing is likely insurmountable (although perhaps it will improve in the cloud). It's good enough. I see plenty of real people -- not empty pods -- riding along on their own horses or in cars. Sometimes they struggle; it can be hard and there is this drift to the right or left you constantly have to correct for -- except when you freeze and can't. But you know, you can fly in SL. You don't need to spend hundreds of RL dollars on Blake Sea land or horses or anything to enjoy SL. Sure, it's fun to have a thing to ride or sail. It's not vital, however, and not worth suffering over.

If the Lindens have extra time, I'd rather they name all their areas instead of calling them all "Coastal Area" and "Protected Land". They should have a contest -- residents would love to name sims. It would be fun

UPDATE: Note my corrected paragraph above about the true creator and deployer of the ugly black "Good Neighbour" obelisks. It's not Timo Daehlie but an obscure resident named Reklame ("advertisement") who has put them all over, and is a member of all the road groups. I'm banning him from Mainland Appreciation because of his hostile activity which doesn't rescue Mainland but despoils it.

I see "Asadorable" has now fallen out with her mates on the Linden Roads Discord server. They've now removed her channels and pictures and blocked her. I'm not sure if you pay for Discord or she paid in part but now others including Dismantled have taken over. It seems Holocluck, who is something of a FIC overload in Bellisseria and other enterprises, was annoyed with her making all those channels. I agree, it seems necessary and I have seen this happen before (which is why I don't like them or make them -- I associate them with games like FreeSO where I was on one). They are very game-like. People over-make channels at work on Slack, too, and people don't use them and forget to view them and crowd into one channel, that's human nature. Only the most draconian bosses can get people to use all of them. Don't worry I, won't be trying to join the pod route users group. Oh, here's some more empty ones going by...Look at this one leaving a road, driving down a dock, going into the water, and converting to a boat -- on Linden land where there already IS a free boat. Sigh.

 

 

Prigs and Prats from Second Life: Coastal Waterways

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

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

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

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

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

Prokofy Neva

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Posted yesterday at 02:43 AM

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

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

Bitsy Buccaneer

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Posted yesterday at 03:08 AM

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

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

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

 

Tari Landar

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Posted yesterday at 03:27 AM

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

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

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

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

Prokofy Neva

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Posted yesterday at 08:08 AM

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

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

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

Bitsy Buccaneer

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Posted yesterday at 08:17 AM

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

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

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

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

Tari Landar

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Posted yesterday at 08:31 AM

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

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

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

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

 

Prokofy Neva

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Posted yesterday at 10:32 AM (edited)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They don't function like every other LM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's another one.

And another one

And another one

And another one

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

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

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

Edited yesterday at 10:38 AM by Prokofy Neva

 

Bitsy Buccaneer

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Posted 9 hours ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, wishing you a lovely day. All the best  

 
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Rufferta

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Posted 2 hours ago

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

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

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

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

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

*why I still play Minecraft sometimes

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

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

 
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Prokofy Neva

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Posted 1 hour ago

  9 hours ago, Bitsy Buccaneer said:

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

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

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

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

Anyway, wishing you a lovely day. All the best  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, don't. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edited just now by Prokofy Neva

 

 
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Prokofy Neva

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Posted 1 hour ago

  2 hours ago, Rufferta said:

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

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

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

*why I still play Minecraft sometimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 
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BITSY BUCCANEER

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

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

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

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

Anyway, wishing you a lovely day. All the best  

PROKOFY NEVA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, don't. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edited just now by Prokofy Neva

 

 

This giant thing is stupid and in the view. You couldn't move it up 1000 m?

 

You have to admire people who make a little old-school home despite the giant menaces nearby.

 

Renata Coy aka Renata Maximus, Boycott Her Store Until Cube Removed

This ugly cube completely taking up her parcel has been here at least 6
months, likely more. She has ignored multiple requests from me and others
to take this down or at least texture it.

Here's her MP store, boycott please:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/69655