By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
Thesis:
The wild distortion of bodies in SL is a form of violence against women, especially pernicious as it hides behind the popular causes of body-positivism and transgenderism. If women commit this violence against themselves, assenting to, or even reveling in grotesquely huge or scratched and bleeding and bruised skins, that doesn't legitimize it.
Note: in SL, as in RL, the taking of photos of people without their permission is not the violation of any RL law or SL TOS. If you don't want to be blogged about as you strut your stuff at a public event, don't strut your stuff. The end. Banning me from a sim or event because you don't like the pictures of yourself or your client -- or what is said about them -- won't leverage your power and ensure the persistence of only docile -- nay, slave-like bloggers-cum-PR agents -- there will be another one like me along in a minute. Give it up. Public discussions with illustrations are needed in a liberal democratic society.
So SHamlet, as I've long called him, has a YouTube show now with Isabelle Cheren, who is a great tweeter and vlogger (you must see her character Auntie Va Gina). As many of you know, I hold nothing but disdain for Hamlet nee Linden Au (read the note at the end if you need the back story*).
Still, it's a "moment" when something historically interesting happened today. For the first time that I can recall (you'll correct me), the essential problem of horrid BODY DISTORTION -- dysmorphia, if you will -- in SL was raised by our public figures -- to be sure, very gingerly, very PC, with plenty of caveats to avoid the haters -- and certainly not deeply in the way I know Isabelle could do this, were she on her own blog solely (but yeah, they all worry about Monetarization...) -- but still....
So let's dig in, shall we?
Last week, SHamlet decided to publish Cajsa Lilliehook's "Bingo Card" on SL Photos on Flickr.
Casja titles her post "SL Flickr Always Showing You The Same Tired Tropes? Play Cliché Bingo!" -- as if the issue is repetitive photo work (she's an expert on SL photos and an artistic photographer herself) -- which side-steps the real roots of the issue, but still...
It hardly got noticed or got a comment -- except for a few giggly notes that yeah, short arms, LOL. Now Cheren will give it more boost.
Time to Poke the Flickeristas
This intervention may have become more possible when SL Flickr is at an all-time historical low and there's less liklihood of backlash -- thousands of SL residents left Flickr for Twitter or other services when Flickr decided earlier this year that all adult content even broadly understood (nude SL avatars) could only be published by paid accounts. Most SL people, even top designers, do not pay for their Flickrs, and Flickr itself always has a message urging you to "show your thanks" by buying them the premium Flickr.
So the Flickr photogs have scattered, and now their works sometimes show up under low-follow accounts with "content warning" covers on Twitter and now Mastadon, but they have reduced their "reach" considerably. Therefore, time to take a poke.
Flickr is where you see some very good stuff, but also a lot of appalling dreck -- just like all SL fashion and art. SL and all its related social media venues of course is the very embodiment of a concept you don't hear about any more called "the long tail".
Flickr is where you learn that girl haranguing you on the forums is likely a boy in RL, because she has nothing but photo after photo of herself giving blow jobs to various over-endowed males. It's really not artistic, hon. It's not even good porn. Ladies, I think we can agree that focusing ONLY on dicks is something that generally girls don't do in their photos and SL in general. Argue you it as much as you like -- I know.
OH, and before we get any further on this -- and yes, wait for my next blog called "On Transgender" -- we'll note that yes, I'm a dumpy, overweight ugly old lady in RL, too -- gosh, like some of these distorted avatars! But no, I'm not "jealous" or "self-hating". Are you? Did you ever endure shit like this in SL?
(The invasion of Twitter by SL Flickeristas was part of the backdrop for the great Contraption Beat-Down this past summer -- which I blogged extensively but which still awaits that shorter, thoughtful round-up blog you really need to understand that it's not about me or even Walton or even anti-rez scripts or even his foul-mouthed mean-ass posse -- it's about the highly-rigid class and rewards structure of our virtual society and what powers are exerted to maintain it this way. And as you know, I'm not a Marxist about these things. If you missed all this, scroll back on my old blog posts, but this one tweet really sums up a lot of the brutal, inane, schoolyard violence of Second Life, if you ask me.)
So in general, the Flickeristas of SL are feeling vulnerable, having lost their prime venue for their works (and what a shame, too -- I stopped going because I didn't want to pay any more, either, without all of them, and now I have run out of photo space) -- and they still haven't really adjusted to Twitter -- and now about half a year after their exodus, Twitter has turned into a raging dumpster fire in Bayonne, NJ which the cops have been bribed by City Hall to ignore.
So...Cajsa -- and SHamlet -- have cast the BODY DISTORTION ISSUE OF SL as a "boring photos" problem. Like, it's ok to have some photos with "dicks as big as a horse". Or it's ok to have a few photos with "children's eyes and faces put on adult bodies" for...some redeeming reason we haven't quite learned yet, but let's say it exists. It's merely a photographic staging problem -- not anything deeper. It's even ok -- more than ok, let's be proud, ladies -- to have YUGE T&A in SL. Certainly, it is!
But...but...some of it is kind of icky and gross, they imply.
Well, I suppose we should accept any legitimization of this topic in any form, since the standard response is:
o It can't be put on the forums, those threads will be deleted or the person raising questions about these outrageously ugly grossly fat and overendowed women in SL must be misogynist, or anti-trans, or a Rethuglican, or worse, a genocidaire of one kind or another.
o You can't put it on your blog outside SL in any form -- see above, you will be mobbed and hated and cancelled.
And now...
o the problem of too-short hands that couldn't reach around and wipe even a modest ass is a far more troublesome problem! Yay! Strawberry Linden -- who established what we might call the Ass Wipe Arm Measurement Standard for SL, fretted recently that a video she posted with herself and others doing a lovely dance highlighted some issue of a too-small head or a too-short arm. Nobody noticed it but her and 3 of her girlfriends. Meanwhile, this "flaw" will be allowed for ever and ever, amen, to wipe out the real problem of slices, cuts, and bruises on women's bodies in SL and the demands for, and uses of, exaggerated demeaningly fat bodies for women. Hello, avatar!
Squishy Thighs
o Example: recently, when I verrrry cautiously raised the issue of the "squishy thighs" (as they are euphemistically called) being suddenly "everywhere" and wondered "how did that happen" -- I wanted to understand the technical and social dynamics -- I got glared at and stomped on and unfollowed recently. These aren't garters, ladies and gents. These are binders that maim and kill.
Even though it ought to be disturbing that suddenly, thousands of virtual women are binding their upper thighs to the point of painful indentation and harm (if done in RL) as a "fashion".
So the way it works with these bodies, from what I can tell, is one of the makers, like Reborne, will make a thing, and then the others copy it. Not literally Copybot it, although that can happen of course, but they are "inspired" to make similar products. Or (if I understand correctly), there are some creators who make a thing like such thighs as body parts that is sold as a feature to body makers (or maybe not, but they spread like kudzu).
Hence the season's tortures (or delights) for bodies just in time for Halloween: thighs squished tight even to the point of bloodlessness and even with barbed wire and blood -- by contrast in time for overstuffing at Thanksgiving -- rounded bellies and "love handles" tacked on to normally super-model-slim mesh bodies (if they aren't the dysmorphic bodies in the first place, in which case they don't need "love handles".
Kardashian on Steroids?
Some fashion analysts trace the grotesquely fat women of SL to the Kupra body, in which a sort of Kardashian on steroids, or a Brazilian bombshell, was to be the ideal -- a pretty face with normal features, long hair sometimes put up in a bun, and then GIGANTIC hips and buttocks. The look is "She has such a pretty face, too bad..." of the type of comment that singer Chrissy Metz heard all her life, providing fodder for endless magazine articles about her attempts to diet.
But Kupra was hardly the first big fat lady body of SL and hardly the only one now. Those of us who go back to the time when there were only system bodies and clothes and sliders know that there were always a few griefers in particular, and possibly a few genuine transgender kink types, who made grotesquely fat women's bodies "for fun" and waddled around even poking people with their giant attributes.
Big doesn't have to be ugly -- and can be beautiful -- when there is attention to line and proportion
Strained, Chaste Discussion
Isabelle and SHamlet go through a very strained, very chaste discussion of these tortured bodies of SL. They genuflect to the four compass points as one does -- they opine that perhaps they're just people expressing themselves -- which, they hasten to assure us -- they surely have the right to do in a virtual world. (And Isabelle, not surprisingly, served up more of that line to me later on Twitter.)
But then there's that troubling tendency -- which has become a tidal wave recently, making this past Halloween the absolute goriest in SL history -- of bleeding, scratched, bruised, damaged skin -- not just a red hand imprint on buttocks, not just a winsome scratch "that embellishes an empty face" (as Gorky said in My Childhood about Russian violence, domestic and public, in general). No, these are tears, rips, gaps, horrors -- mutilation. Like the photos of RL people I have seen or met who have gone through Russian filtration camps, in the Chechen, Syrian, and Ukrainian wars. That's why I think such things should never be played with.
And why you will never see me going to bid for Patch Linden to be sprung from "jail". The RL father of my RL children spent 9 years in the GULAG and his brother and grandfather perished there, along with friends and colleagues. It's not something you play with. But that's just me. For most people in SL, Gorky works find. Slashes and bites and blood are fashion and liven up a dull virtual world -- which always has more reality than humankind can bear.
This isn't in the bedroom -- this is a public figure at a public event, setting the tone. So I say, "Look at yourselves. What the HELL are you doing?!"
This troubles the bien pensant SHamlet -- he'll excuse and applaud BDSM but not THAT much of a public display of disaffection -- but then comes the "uncomfortable" silence -- and mention of "that issue," as these two very vaguely reference what is in turn euphemistically called "age play" in SL but which in fact is child pornography, and banned by the Lindens because in many RL jurisdictions it is a crime.
Still, can you be sure? Wouldn't want to step on anyone's self expression! The tap-dance done here is fascinating -- and again -- on her own, Isabelle would be more frank, but there you are -- the price of getting 2,800 subscriptions -- which is huge for an SL vlogger -- is precisely that. You do watch what you say. She claims not, of course in this discussion which hinges on the liberal premise that you can always impugn to another human being engaged in some awful act some sort of rationale that would be justifiable. Well, no. You don't. Putin had an unhappy childhood but that doesn't justify mass murder.
"I Like to Jiggle Jiggle"
At one point I was making a folder of these grotesque body distorted women of SL but I can't find it now -- and for more biting satire around them than I can deliver, go and see Naria Panther -- in this case, 13:40 for example. She simply goes to the latest merchant event and pans her camera around. These aren't exceptions or freaks. We've all seen them many times. I have had the precise same experiences, as we all have, looking in horrid fascination as an amply-endowed lady-love jiggles to a halt in front of a display she wants to examine -- and then keeps jiggling and jiggling, way past the sell-by date, and way past anything like RL atall.
The racks on these babes would deserve their own zip code -- if their ass cheeks hadn't been gerrymanded ahead of time to get their own damn county. One wonders -- delicately -- how they, er, do it, without creating all kinds of rendering and eclipsing issues for the SL engine. BTW, if you want to see SL porn done properly, with all the technical issues studied and generally solved, at least with slender bodies, you can join the group Black.Sand furniture group (the guy is Russian, and for him it is the каракум) and see the link to Google docs in his latest notice.
But Are They Really Like That?
Big bosom, sure -- but not grotesque. And thighs are adorned, not squished. It can be done, ladies!
I decided to just take a quick tour around the main events this evening -- although most of them opened yesterday or a few days ago and have now utterly emptied out, their cam sims utterly useless. THAT is the state of the SL economy and the product of an excessive proliferation of events. Still, there's a few points that can be observed:
o Fashion, you know? An angular dress can be very bizarre or extreme in Paris, but by the time it gets to Schenectady's dress-makers, it will be rather dumbed down and softened. And just because creators MAKE these hideous get-ups, with photos of the stupidest-looking models they can find, doesn't mean people buy them or wear them -- or if they do, wear them all the time. If they're on mod, they might revise them. So it's hard to know how prevelant this FASHION is in actual USE without real sociological study;
o If you take the top "Big Girls" event (didn't it used to be called THICC? that's the word used for this style anyway) -- you realize that as in the cover picture of the event, large does not mean ugly or distorted. These are beautiful bodies, in proportion, or even if not in proportion exactly, still done esthetically. Esthetics do matter, and there are universal notions of what constitutes aesthetical lines, even if they can differ from culture to culture. Harmony. Balance. Restraint. You can do "big" or "busty" without being an atrocity. In fact, I noticed (I'd never gone to this event), most of the wares on sale were not even as "large" as in the cover photo. They were merely what you might call "curvy".
So to be clear here, Big Girls and the kind of bodies and outfits at this event is NOT what I mean -- or most people would mean -- by "body distortion" in SL.
This is more what we mean by "body distortion" in every way:
Is this what we mean by "distorted"? Well, for some, here, yes. Notice the men aren't distorted; the women are! Still, that's not what most people gawk at, except for good reasons.
o So, in short, where you see the big bums in particular, they aren't THAT big as the extremes that Panther found -- or that I've seen over the years and that seem to stand out. That is, if you just look at the events, what they offer, and the people who go to them, you see there is a LOT LESS body distortion in SL than you might have thought. To be sure, there is still SOME -- and I see it around at other types of events or among my tenants (although not at art gallery openings and not at the top-spending level of tenant). Yes, I correlate outrageous body distortions with the poor, for all kinds of reasons, in my observation. Again, argue if you like on principal -- but you haven't seen thousands upon thousands of tenants, and I have.
YET IT IS STILL PREVELANT ENOUGH TO SPREAD AND DEMAND JUSTIFICATION -- WHICH IT SHOULD NOT.
o Occasionally, you could even find that the "bruised and battered" look isn't meant to mean "BDSM" or "domestic violence victim" but "girl who clambered up a mountain and maybe scraped her knees". Like this person:
Not, like the grotesque character at 10:18 on Panthar's video -- grotesque mainly because of her dreadful jiggling.
Does that mean that Panthar is lying? Cherry-picking? Distorting herself? No, she's reporting the truth of the situation -- there is more and more grotesqueness out there. But there are distinctions and the top designers and their customers make them -- fortunately for the aesthetics of SL.
Another example of a person who emphasized her butt and put on garters -- but not to the point of pain and distraction.
That doesn't excuse the enormous amount of fashion AND use of damage that I see all over SL -- it's a culture indeed of sadism and masochism in every way. Virtuality amplifies and rewards this. That's why I worry deeply.
(No, I don't agree with you that BDSM is just a "lifestyle" -- I think it's an aggressive dysfunction that does not keep to its own supposed rules of consent whatsoever and has bled out extensively into the public square. At the level of my rentals, I accept that BDSM is a choice for the bedroom, and I'm colour-blind, and don't "go there" because I believe strenuously in privacy and tolerance and pluralism (as distinct from an endless parade of belligerent diversities). But as a choice for society to tolerate, I reject BDSM. I don't like it when people go into events with their clanking chains (often in the form of pixels, but still), with degraded slaves crawling behind them. It's simply wrong. The extraordinary number of "safe houses" for subs lets you know that.)
o It's also important to note that body dysmorphia and BDSM are intertwined but not coterminous. And that's helpful to understand when thinking about this problem -- which, BTW, there is little you can do about in a world for adults, but it is an issue you can discuss and guide your children on.
So on moral grounds, even by their ultra-liberal lights, the Lindens should ban "Capture Roleplay" sites. On technical grounds they can't, having once accepted that BDSM as a category can be tolerated as "adult". If they got into adjudicating what is "Capture Roleplay" and what is "BDSM," even if making a public/private distinction, they would be endlessly parsing badly-filled out ARs or their own grainy screenshots. They won't be doing that.
All children go through stages of hatred and dislike of their bodies, and other children sadly help them to suffer in these stages. Like Kimmie Dawson, quoting her late friend Genevive:
She said 'I like giants
Especially girl giants
'Cause all girls feel too big sometimes
Regardless of their size'
I don't believe the cure for these childhood woes that persist into adulthood is grotesquerie in the public square of SL as a normalizing phenomenon. Sometimes it's good to leave things as an aesthetic and moral issue, realizing you can't legislate around it. In fact, when you can't legislate, or shouldn't legislation because of "too blunt an axe," that's all the more reason to take a moral stance and condemn it. And so I do.
The wild distortion of bodies in SL is a form of violence against women, especially pernicious as it hides behind the popular causes of body-positivism and transgenderism. If women commit this violence against themselves, assenting or reveling in grotesquely huge or scratched and bleeding and bruised skins, that doesn't legitimize it.
My conclusion from years of observation of this issue is there are three reasons for the grotesque distortion of women's bodies in SL -- ranging in degree of prevalence:
- Women wear exaggerated bodies and outfits of this nature because men like it, or they think men like it. They do it sometimes happily, and over-do it -- they do it under pressure. But the source of their doing this is not in their own hearts, except in the sense of neediness. Here's a so-very-SL scene -- the girl is stark naked in a large public event, standing close in front of her boyfriend who is gazing at her, oblivious of other males -- or females -- ogling here -- with the tell-tale tag of a "demo". She's trying on a body or body part or skin or whatever for his approval.
Yes, it's simply a Thanksgiving weekend shopping outing for this loving couple. But could you think about it, please.
"How about squishy, but not TOO squishy, hon, ok?"
Yes, there are men who like such grossly distorted bodies, especially huge asses -- everybody remembers the song "Baby Got Back". And no, this isn't just a Black cultural issue, because dysmorphic bodies in SL range in races and don't seem over-represented to any one. - Some trans women adopt the exaggerated, heavily sexually endowed and provocative look as part of their transition in RL or their choice in SL. I don't perceive transgenderism as RP. The RP of transgenderism isn't necessarily the same thing as the drag queen but these are separate issues. Some feminists that are labelled as TERFS call this a "kink" -- like the RL shop teacher who insisted on coming to class with giant boobs and gained the right to do this in her school (I just hope her boobs don't get caught in a lathe). When observing types who do this, sometimes among tenants, I'm kind of amazed that they don't seem concerned at all about how they are perceived by others -- and are oblivious, if not defiant. My own conviction is that this form of virtual transgenderism, whether by RL transgender people or SL aspiring transgender people or just jokesters is not rooted in actual kindness to biological women. There is a certain hatred that comes out that is a dynamic involving shocking and inciting others, so that they then disdain or even hate this distorted female body. I don't think there's necessarily anything "healthy" here -- I think the desire to distort the female body outrageously is a dysfunction and it's fine to question it.
Of course, we're not supposed to question it -- which is why SHamlet weighing in on this topic -- during the week of the aftermath of the Club Q massacre -- is interesting. The Lindens and their hangers-on are always hoping to "clean up" SL and "manage" the "adult content". To what end? A sale? Of course, Casja's Bingo Card was published on November 17, days before the Club Q massacre. That's not the point; the point all these issues are coming together everywhere, and they had a felt need to air them.
3. Finally, some women with huge bodies in SL have them in RL and want to "be themselves" and "be body-positive" and "overcome stereotypes". And more power to them. I notice that most of the women who do this do not hideously distort; they just have large or even obese bodies, but their ass doesn't stick out from here to Nebraska, you know? Their boobs don't poke your eye out in revenge. That's the thing. You really can feel the difference.
Bodies that tile the female form unnaturally so it can be more accessible to males are troubling, but it's all too common in RL and SL.
So...stop here for a minute. The greatest form of distortion in SL is precisely the gigantism of the buttocks, and secondarily, the breasts -- often the breasts are made childishly small by comparison to the enormous ass for contrast. Of course, this position is associated with men simply banging a broad, like an animal, not seeing their faces or interacting with any other part of them, as distinct from laying on top of them, gazing into their face, and asking them what they would like. And on the Bingo card, this holds only one delicately phrased box: "implausibly big hips and thighs".
No, Casja. They aren't just "implausible" -- they are hideously huge. And they aren't just the hips and thighs -- they are the buttocks. Putting a square "ASS CHEEKS" in all caps doesn't convey that these are GROSSLY DISTORTED -- it conveys merely that they are shown -- like the "camel toes" and the men's "packages". (A term SHamlet uses several times in the show).
I don't think there's anything to celebrate with no. 2 as there is with no. 3, but sexual preference isn't something you can dictate or change -- whatever cultural factors go into shaping it, there's inherency in gender and preferences for gender, in my view. Prosecuting some elements of it, regarding children and enslavement and brutality in particular, but it's hard to change. In our virtual world, the fact that SHamlet and Isabelle have now set the bien pensant tone for this as being "disturbing" when it involves "printing children's faces on adult bodies" and "painful" when involving "squishy thighs" -- and merely deserving of derision in horse penises -- and particularly troubling when it comes to gashes and bruises. They hypothesize for a minute that some women appearing in SL all battered and blue maybe "working out issues" or something but I'm not buying that.
As one of my blog commentators famously said about my discussion of the child avatars "working out issues of abuse" by making their child avatars subject to simulated virtual abuse: "What's in it for Daddy?" Why is he being ever-so-helpful in putting this "child" partner through their humiliation? Indeed.
Shamlet and Charen staking a little bit of a claim on this subject is welcome. Yes, it's partial and needs to go further -- but ultimately it isn't going to change anything for the masses. Still, you can be sure that certain mavens on the talk show and art gallery and Linden office hour circuit are going to slightly adjust their wardrobes and maybe heal up some of those many bruises and scratches. The gauntlet has been thrown down.
PS: You can also be sure that a certain number of gals will come in and now and "set me straight" with defiant millennial or Gen X or Gen Y "gurl power" that their mutilation is a form of glory. I just don't get it, they'll say!
To which I can say: how come the men aren't scratched and beaten and bruised? Huh? How's that for a question. And PPS -- sometimes, not often, you will see men, too -- especially Black men -- with these "adornments" which also bears pondering.
Will the Lindens change their TOS to forbid mutilated skins? Of course not. They'll invoke zombies and aliens and war sim RPs. They'll invoke whatever they need to invoke to keep this particularly high-paying constituency. I have AR'd some of the most hideous Halloween gore bodies and skins and outfits -- to no avail. And how could there be any reaction when the Lindens own haunted house contains a pick-up truck with mutilated dead bodies in it? For me, it's a pick-up truck nearly identical to a photo I wrote about from the RL Battle of Ilovaisk, which is why I never go to the Linden's haunted house every year. They never take that monstrosity down.
I realize that I haven't been able to illustrate this post with the really most grotesque images we already all know about. That maybe I fail to make my case, and not only for that reason. The default assumption about virtual worlds is that everybody would want to be tan, fit, and 21, with maybe larger boobs or dicks than RL, but not at the grotesque and obese level we see them. Yet that is NOT what happened in the reality of our virtuality, and we need to study the three reasons I have outlined -- and others -- for an explanation.
It's good to cry "Hold, enough!" in virtual worlds. And so I do.
*I view SHamlet, who was the official Linden court blogger for too many years before he went "independent," as something of a talentless hack. Enthusiastically and uncritically blogging about the Lindens' every fabulous move in those early years was really noxious. The Alphaville Herald with its tabloid approach and biting satire was truly preferable. I've had an ongoing critique of him for years for all his distortions and outright lies serving the Lab and the cool kids, and it's been a mystery how he makes a living (and he even has another book coming out about the Metaverse). I guess it's the speaker's fees, like with all the tech journos. I can't imagine the ads on his blog bring in much but he is popular in the way state media is with a certain SL crowd. SHamlet only benefits by bringing on Charen, who *does* have talent and a following, but of course he'd bring on a white girl who isn't going to be too critical of the Lab, and not one of the numerous kick-ass Black bloggers on YouTube who don't even get a mention even when the Lab itself features them.Does this sound mean? Then you don't know the history of SL or his completely self-serving and disingenuous interview of me, calling me a "Noam Chomsky" (!) merely because I criticized LL and its favourites and tech in general -- which wasn't popular 18 years ago as it is now! This summaries up the whole thing for me: at the end of SLCC I in 2004, Philip asked everyone in the conference (perhaps 200 people?) to pose in a picture together, because he said SL was like "the dawning of the Internet," that the "whole new world" of the Metaverse was something we would all look back on as being founded then. This is where I BOLTED from the room. It was a crazy instinctive thing. By that point it wasn't just that I myself had suffered in SL and been targeted for all kinds of hate campaigns, including by Lindens (yes, by Lindens), it was that I was watching the damaging effect on other people -- that was back when I thought I saw the future of the Internet was inside SL (not much different than Philip) and that it "had to be stopped" -- before I realized SL was merely a concentrated form like a magnifying glass starting a fire on a leaf -- in fact the phenomena that led to 8chan and mass school shootings wasn't just in SL, it was all over the Internet. More on that another time.
So as I RAN from this room -- I valued SL, and I appreciated Philip, but I didn't want to be in the "Founding Fathers" photo and take responsibility historically. So...who should I meet rushing in the other direction, so as not to miss the photo op? SHamlet! Of course! He couldn't BEAR to miss out -- FOMO -- and had to be present at that Founding Fathers (and to some extent Mothers) moment for "the Metaverse". Hard to remember now that we talked about "the METAAA-verse" even more and as wild-eyed and crazily then as people do now -- and we laugh at them, we jaded consumers of corporate virtuality. Too bad humdog isn't alive to see this. Or maybe not.
I'll admit freely that I haven't followed SHamlet too closely in the last few years because it seems to me he put his blog kind of on autopilot with re-pasted forums posts or mass media news and plenty of posts by valiant worker bees like Cajsa Lilliehook who diligently post original content for him. That's always the formula, girls! He was ATROCIOUS on the gatcha issue as I noted, unnecessary amplifying a lawyer who was entirely doing the Lab's bidding instead of challenging them.
And here's all you need to know about SHamlet: because I have had a long-standing criticism of him (such as this post about his economic favouritism or this critique of his reporting on skins for minorities or this left-handed praise ), which began with his mocking interview of me, he devised a policy for his comments section that would ONLY apply to me. If I ever commented on any of his posts on New World Notes, I would have to put my RL name in full. I couldn't use my avatar name. No one else had to suffer that sort of exposure to harassment that comes with giving your RL name around virtual world types -- only me. That is, he wouldn't bar my posts on grounds of obscenity, or trolling, even as tendentiously understood in those circles, because it wouldn't be there. That's the thing. He would instead force exposure of RL on me -- to the legions of griefers showing up in his comments (more then than now) to harass and bully me further in RL and SL -- just to make a criticism of him. That's despicable and can't be justified in any way, and the more discriminating leading lights of SL get that.
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