Second Thoughts

Metal Feathers

Metal Feathers JeanClaude Gaffer Visit Sutherland (200, 12, 24)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

Avataric Healing Solution

Avataric Healing Solution On sale for $1 Visit Sutherland (206, 10, 24)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

Stupid and contagious

Stupid and contagious Woodbury event griefers Visit Sutherland (198, 10, 25)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

Open Letter to Tateru Nino of NCI

Dear Tateru,

I'm making this an open letter so that you'll be sure to see it and not say messages capped and so that it can be widely and openly discussed in and out of NCI.

I understand you have taken over the leadership of NCI, a once-respected organization which no longer has my respect.

I totally support Carl Metropolitan, a friend and tenant, who for many years had rented NCI info nodes on my properties in Ravenglass. I support the position that he took when he was forced to step down, namely, that no member of NCI volunteer staff should also simultaneously hold membership in a known griefing group. This generic principle applied specifically to the avatar Imnotgoing Sideways, who appears inworld pretending to be a "little woman" while admittedly attempting to go under the radar as a BDSM-practicing child, who has been banned from my land for event disruption and harassment repeatedly as a member of the known and documented griefing group Woodbury University.

I'm well aware of your extremist and sectarian views on matters like ageplay (excessively tolerant even of sexualized ageplay); and griefers (excessively tolerant of griefing groups and claiming that one can never practice "guilt by association".

One can abstractly debate the alleged "association fallacy" until the cows come home, but real life provides some instructive insights. At Nuremberg, it was the Soviets who lobbied assiduously against prosecution of groups for mass crimes against humanity because they feared the making of a principle of international law that would be used to prosecute their own criminality in the Communist Party of the USSR and its affiliates. The Germans ended the scourge of Nazism not only with the prosecution of individuals, however, but by something just as important: barring from public office anyone who was a member of Nazi organizations. They concluded properly that the nature of the organization itself was criminal, and that even innocents (Kurt Waldheim was considered one - until he wasn't) could not be allowed to hold public office because of the nature of that group criminality and all that it stood for. By contrast, the Soviets never put the perpetrators of mass murder from the CPSU on trial; and Yeltsin's attempt to have a policy against allowing CPSU members to hold public office failed, in part due to Western leftists concerned about the repercussions on their own organizations. You can judge a lot about the success of these policies against members of criminal groups holding public office by the outcomes of these societies since Nuremberg; whatever its problems, Germany is a liberal social democracy under the rule of law, whereas Russia remains an authoritarian state where civil society actors are murdered with impunity and a neo-fascist movement has gained alarming foothold.

Groups that tolerate and condone and incite and commit crime are rightly and legitimately called under the law in liberal democratic societies as "conspiracies," and in this case it is absolutely justified to bar the group, as well as the individual and to prosecute group membership as an aggravating circumstance.

How can one determine whether a group is criminal? By the actions of its members, and whether such actions are deliberate, systematic, gross, etc. A look at the list of the many members of the Woodbury University active in SL who visit Ravenglass in order to deliberately heckle and harass me and my tenants shows an alarming number who have been permabanned and who have been successfully abuse-reported. This list, as well the voluminous amount of documentation I've put on my blog about the criminality of this group should leave no doubt in anyone's mind. In the last three years, Woodbury, merely a cover for w-hat, b-tards, 4-chans and other criminal Internet movements much larger than SL, have had literally hundreds of members, many day-old alts, commit the following offenses:

o rapes of tenants, for which the Lindens punished one offender once with a 7-day ban

o repeated crashing of sims leading to perma-banning

o constant event disruption leading to bans

o renaming of a griefing group design to taunt and harass me to The Study of the Dewey Decimal System

o use of my name as a key word in search/places description in order to annoy, which was removed by Lindens.

This documented evidence that can be seen from Linden action lets you know a simple truth:

No member of NCI should also be a member of Woodbury or any of its offshoot groups also used for griefing like the ill-named "Prokofy's Fan Club" etc.

That you and other leaders of NCI could not see your way clear to doing that is really disturbing and calls into question your legitimacy.

As you know, Imnotgoing Sideways is banned from Ross and Sutherland and other areas where I have had events, and where he has arrived together with actively griefing and disruptive members of Woodbury who spewed particles, spammed racist slogans, etc. and then pretended that he was "just there to hear the discussion". Despite IMing me after his second ban "That was brief... Sorries. (T_T)" with an impudent little grin -- a clear admission that he was playing a game of trying to fly under the radar, ther are still no shortage of idiots on sluniverse.com and elsewhere that think he is somehow entitled to come to my events and fly around my malls with impunity and endlessly enjoy freedom from "guilt by association".

By the time this manipulative creep was coming *a third time* at the *exact same time* as a group of Woodbury goons who began spamming chat and rezzing self-replicating prims to disrupt an event, it was very clear that there was only one game being played by this little creature: trying to obnoxiously insist in literalist w-hat fashion that he was innocent and tragically misunderstood and shouldn't be associated with the guilty.

If this person were in fact sincere and were in fact able to function without deep and cynical manipulation, they'd be gone by now. But because he is a dysfunctional acting out in a virtual world in an anonymous setting, he keeps returning.

As Woodbury has been increasingly constrained by the Lindens who in fact follow up on all their griefing tactics and discipline them (i.e. renaming grief groups, banning sim crashers, stoping the nasty practice of putting my name in key words on their land in order to harass me and confuse tenants), they've found another soft target -- the resident-developed infohub which I helped design and where I help newbies.

Here, along with new alts of Tizzers Foxchase/Tizzy Teardrop and other goons fro WU, Imnotgoing has come daily to caper and prance and show off his sickening act -- that of a BDSM practioning child, all the while pretending that this child is in fact a "little woman" and that the BDSM collar and vices are in fact "robot parts". It's more of that impudent sort of sailing under the radar and everyone can see it in this thread.

I go into detail on this matter to fully describe the context here for my request to you for immediate action.

Unless you immediate instruct your volunteer employee Imnotgoing Sideways to 1) leave the known and documented griefing group Woodbury University and sever all ties with it if he is to remain in NCI and 2) cease coming to the Ross infohub and surrounding areas, both of which are actions taken so as to grief and harass me and others and for no other reason, your rentals will be terminated and your prims returned.

It's just that simple.

It doesn't matter that Ross infohub is a public place, opened by Governor Linden. If you as an NCI leader cannot ensure that your volunteer staff comports themselves decently in a public place in PG, and restrain your members from obvious griefing antics like this, you are not welcome on the land that is my land.

Ross is not a commercial sim. It is PG, and the stores and rentals on that sim barely cover the tier. It provides a number of services to newbies and more importantly midbies. It does not require any further volunteer help nor does it require NCI to succeed. The purpose of this infohub is to enable those who are seeking more extensive knowledge and skills than just the basics, i.e. who want to learn about groups, land, business, etc. can have a place to find information and contacts.

It is widely recognized that the chief way that griefing groups try to pretend they are legitimate is by demonstrably and aggressively helping newbies, often in fact heckling them under the radar, and often recruiting for their griefing escapades while "helping".

Those that have a yen for helping newbies don't have to do it in Ross -- there are literally hundreds of other welcome areas, Linden sites, and infohubs now so that the long-standing harassment technique of the wall-sitters and the other hub infestations of demanding the "right" to hang out because they "help newbs" can be dropped as outmoded.

No one can literally stop anyone from coming on to Governor Linden land. But just because literally this is a public place where this is the case does not mean that NCI volunteer staff have to behave like assholes and deliberately come to *this* one to heckle me and others.

It's just that simple.

Everyone can see in a provocative thread like that, describing impudent and provocative actions in world to "make a point" about reprehensive BDSM child avatars and their "rights", that there isn't any genuine helping of newbies here.

So it's very simple, Tateru: cut the unseemly cord that NCI has with Woodbury. Clearly Woodbury has targeted your organization to pull another Bolshevik displacement operation to infilatrate and ruin a group's good reputation and use that reputation for cover to proceed with its usual menu of obvious griefing activities, both under-the-radar and actually violating the TOS.

Don't let that happen; it's very easy to prevent it, and it means ceasing the weak tendency to political-correctness and weepy-eyed faux liberalism about helping newbs and not discriminating against people, and cutting out Woodbury. If they threaten you with retaliation or cause retaliation after that, then you have a case for LL and in fact the FBI.

I fully realize that even if you finally cut the cord on these manipulative monsters and specifically this creepy little ageplay edgecaser Imnotgoing Sideways, they can still come to this open Governor Linden land and harass me. No matter -- ending the ability of them to make groups for recruiting and identity consolidation is key to diminishing their harassment.

I also fully realize that if you do nothing, and I am forced to terminate NCI's rentals, that they can still come and harass me and may even do so more than ever -- but then do be aware I will continue to publicize the negative reputation that NCI will be accruing by being unable to bite the bullet on a notorious griefing group harbouring even worse griefing groups whose land has now been twice seized by the Lindens for cause, once clearly due to griefing and the second time evidently for non-payment.

The griefing parcel these goons deliberately bought from an oldbie who was also there to heckle me, at extortionist prices, on Ravenglass ought to be testament enough and obvious enough to the true nature of this group. The notion that some members of Woodbury are just playing in the sandbox and merely good citizens thoughtfully participating in public discussions is utterly bogus. In three years, I've had hundreds of w-hat/b-tard/Woodbury griefers harass me, and I simply do not follow the PC beliefs of the geeks that not publicizing this form of harassment is somehow magically effective in ending it (not true), or pretending that griefing is an occasion for me to have a soulful introspection of the non-seriousness of myself or the Internet (it's not).

There is a swift, effective and necessary way to significantly curb griefing in SL: end the groups that support it; end the supporters of those groups.

If you persist in propping up the structure of griefing by fallaciously invoking "guilt by association fallacy" and immorally turning a blind eye to criminal conspiracy, I'll consider you -- and NCI -- to be part of the problem, and not part of the solution. You can expect I'll be an active lobbier with the Lindens in not recognizing your organization to participate in the Residents' Help Network.

Sincerely,

Prokofy Neva

Chicken List

I started keeping a visitor tracker next to the Woodbury grief-lot in Ravenglass, and also a "leader board" that grabs profiles so that all those goons coming to harass me and hang out in the grief-build can go on the record.

Of course, as it takes a 96 m radius, the list will naturally capture some legitimate tenants, boaters and just people browsing for rentals. I've tried to take them out of the list to the extent possible -- there were about 50 people in that category of the run I just happened to list of some 225.

There were a lot of very blank alts that look like either grief-alts or gawker-alts and of course there were some rubber-neckers who aren't necessarily griefers but feel they simply must come and "share in the fun" like Trinity Coulter from the Concierge List.

Many of them have Woodbury University in their groups or the other grief groups like b-tards, W-hat, etc. Several from Jesse and other war groups.

What's striking in this list is that at least 10 percent of them are permanently banned - missing completely from the People List, not for nonpayment of bills because mostly they don't have payment on file. Some are the obvious alts of Jim Schack/Jim Korpov/Charity Stohr/Korpov Korpov and KorpovKorpovKorpovKorpov infinity-alt-sign -- he's one of the most vicious frequent flyer griefers, leaving around dead chickens, etc. etc.

That's a lot of people to be in a list of visitors; the percentage is higher of just those in Woodbury, more like 25 percent or greater. This is just visitors in the last 30 days or so, so it's telling. I've also listed whose responsible for what griefing -- and you see that the list of visitors is also about 25 percent hands-on nasty griefers who take actions to actually harass through event discruption, prim littering, particle spewing, etc. etc. Some of the most frequent annoyers are under-the-radar types specializing in the menu of non-TOS-offenses like "offer TP" or "buy something for a dollar" or "buy and refund" or "offer friendship" or stalk around the grid or flee from parcel to parcel as they are banned.

I'm also putting in a chat log from the Ross infohub where they've been annoying me because it's a good illustration of what drives these goons -- the desire to pick on someone and see them squirm or react or get angry or react -- Wut Moorlord, the latest tormenter says, tellingly:

"[19:19]  Wut Moorlord: you're such a wonderful plaything prokofy."

Ugh.

You can also see how these fucktards, who routinely go around exposing privacy through stalking, harassment and use of third-party viewers, suddenly scream like banshees over having their profiles grabbed.

And these freaks who have repeatedly harassed me with pictures of my RL self inworld, puppets of my real life self, etc etc suddenly scream like stuck pigs about "disclosure" just because I note inworld what is said on the Herald, and which is already published on Facebook or whatever, the connection between this "90 pounds of boy in a 100 pound body" named Jordan Bellino and Tizzers Foxchase/Tizzy Teardrop/Joanna Falmer and the other alts.

Cutting Off the Long Tail: The Lindens Chop off Freebies from XStreet

There's quite a fascinating development going on in the commerce forums of Second Life as numerous merchants de-list their freebie wares from the popular web shopping site xstreet.com which Linden Lab purchased and coopted for its harsh economic reform plans for the virtual world last year.

With the unexpected announcement that all freebies will now have to pay to list -- essentially pricing many small retailers, philanthropists, and educators out of the virtual market -- many are simply calling it quits.

For once, instead of seeing people merely whine but continue to pay tier, commissions --and attention --to Linden Lab, we are seeing dozens of people instantly vote with their feet. They are either completely withdrawing their items, or simply raising their prices from $0 or $1 or higher. Listings will now cost $99 per item per month if the item is free,  and $10 for items of $1, with a minimum of $3 commission for listings under $50, so, like an accelerated version of the controversial practices of ebay. Thousands of items have already been removed today. Read the roadmap for the details.

The most odious aspect of all this is seeing the coopted residents-turned-Lindens pretend that they widely consulted residents of SL about the move, merely because they had a post buried somewhere and some office hours with Pink Linden, who formerly worked at ebay and was brought in to revise the shopping site to make more money for Linden Lab -- the future is widely believed to be in sales of virtual goods, not rental of server space. In fact, one of the most controversial features appearing in the survey to selected residents is the idea that tier for server space for stores inworld could become a percentage of sales.

I myself am a long time opponent of excessive freebies. Freebies have their place, when they are basic utilities, like a notecard giver script, or helpful items to learn from, or loss-leaders or demos from stores. But there are definitely way, way too many of them inworld and on Xstreet precisely because many people want to enhance their reputation by being seen to "do good" and "help da noobz". It's a very, very deepseeted cultural norm of SL I've always targeted for scathing exposure because many of the people doing this merely want to feel others are dependent on them, to influence them, to corral them into collectives, or simply steer them to more expensive commerce of themselves or their friends. The best freebies for me are right next to paid content where they belong -- operations consisting entirely of freebies can't get their bills paid and people who will not let freebies be sold even for $1 to be distributed further want YOU to tier their creations or their "benevolence" and that's wrong.

Still, the direct opposite of the extreme Lessigism and Creative Communism of SL is creator-fascism, where only the most skilled and connected people get to sell in a terribly cramped and restricted marketplace. There has to be a balance -- some freebies, easy entrance with freebies, but paid content as well.

Most people hearing about the charging for freebies -- that they are to be treated as advertising, essentially -- are pulling their free items completely rather than "advertise" with them.

Look at the numbers, as Kyle Beltran at post no. 400 suggests:

11/18/2009 4:20pm - 170 replies - Xstreet Apparel category: 400433 items.

5:20pm - Apparel: 399991 (-442)

5:40pm - 399456 (another -535)

7:40pm - 379 replies - 397841 (another -1615)

Totalling 2592 items in "a 3D virtual world created by its Residents", in the Apparel category alone, GONE in 3 hours.

Items on meta-life, slapt, apez and metaverse exchange all grew."

My bet is that we're going to see something nasty done to the ability of these third-party exchanges to keep coming in and out of SL and that they're going to get their wings clipped, too. Watch this space.

I've suggested that this measure should have been introduced more slowly, and done in stages, as follows:

1. Voluntary compliance with encouragement of people to value themselves, charge for their work, and during the high volume holiday season, earn more money and help the economy for all of us. If I make more money in SL, I buy  more content -- that's true of all of us, so it helps

2. Then move to a straightforward, low-cost listing fee for freebies that is only $25 per store, i.e. per page (not $99 per item) -- that's what you'd pay to display a freebie inworld. See if the combination of one and two helps boost revenue and covers the costs that ostensibly need to be made.

3. Then move to a higher cost like $75 ($99 is just too high) if it seems warranted -- as freebies dry up from the Xstreet -- but hopefully 1) and 2) would obviate this. Of course, it's not really about cost-covering but about revenue-extraction.

I have quite the answer to Pink's thread too -- these threads are impossible to link to directly, one of the main annoyances of the blogorum.

As I've noted in this thread, I don't at all believe in the mantra that freebies help sell priced items. I've experimented endlessly with this, putting freebies and dollarbies or $10 items side by side and found in the land preserve the following rock-solid pattern:

o people who take freebies never leave tips -- hugely rare for any freebie-taker to ever do so

o tippers almost never take freebies, and very, very seldom buy content

o content buyers never tip or take freebies

The costs of the land preserve are paid by...guess which group? The paid-content buyers. those buying the candles or donuts or tents pay the search ads and pay towards tier. Those tipping leave $5 and $10 which is less than the paid content. Those taking the freebies take and take -- often huge quanities. Nothing promotes grabbiness like freebies. And nothing gets costs covered like buybies.

Even so, the freebies have their place, and the Lindens' rationale for this really, really stinks: they say that because only 20 percent of the content sells on XStreet, the rest of it is dross -- they make this direst statement on their "road map".

As always, SL is a crystal ball. Watch for the long tail to get chopped on other social media and watch more charging everywhere.

Missauke

Missauke By Bith Wierwight Visit Missauke (172, 130, 91)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

Back Off, IBM

The Quiet by AM Radio. Is it all produced and paid for and insinuated by IBM?

Lately, I've found IBM just way, way WAY too intrusive into the virtual world of Second Life. I really don't like it that these elephant-big partners of Linden Lab, who don't even stand by their junior partner start-up, end up overwhelming everything with their own big, aggressive agenda.

I'm all for capitalism and big companies that hire people and make good products, advertise them, and sell them! That's liberal capitalism, which I support enthusiastically. Sometimes, like democracy, capitalism is "the worse system except for all the others". And of course, there needs to be some sense of social responsibility and a corporate code of behaviour.

What sorts of corporate codes does IBM have for its presence in SL? It only has rules dealing with what its employees wear and do as avatars, but I don't see that it has a larger code that would restrain some of its nastier manifestations in trying to use its considerable clout to pressure Linden Lab, a mouse compared to this elephant, to change its feature sets or programs in ways that will suit its corporate agenda (that LL may willingly go along with this now doesn't obviate my disturbing point).

There are at least four episodes lately that really make me question IBM, and decide that it really needs to be called on what it is doing, and pushed back -- hard. I don't doubt that I'll hear any number of disagreements from IBM employees, explicit and hidden, and their fans, who are on the payroll or who just think big IT should rule, because then they as puny opensourcenikes can either get their code co-opted and shor up their sagging self-worth -- or they can get jobs in these big companies.

1) The most obvious annoyance of IBM lately is Dale Innis. Dale Innis, whose real-life name I haven't bothered to go find, is an obnoxious, intrusive, stalky, manipulative sort of guy. His favourite thing to say is that he "doesn't represent IBM". And yet, I've never, ever seen IBM senior officials ever, ever repudiate what Dale Innis is doing, or restrain him in every way, ever. I've never seen them disassociate from his legion of smarmy, Eddie Haskell manipulative comments here on my blog or his own blog, and indeed, if I ever complain about Dale Innis to other employees who seem somewhat better-mannered and discrete in their SL presence, although they share many of the same extremist viewpoints, they say "talk to Dale" -- there's no supervision. I won't go through a point-by-point rebuttal of Dale's googling-bombing hate-page of me or his tiresome self-justifying antics that amount to constantly literalizing and distraction from his real offensive behaviour, such as stalking me into JIRAs I've proposed to heckle them or post more than 200 posts on my blog for a year, until I finally banned him for *causing of damages in RL and SL* because I saw him starting to show up on *every* outside discussion of SL outside the SLogosphere to denigrate and harass me, and he also simply reached the threshold for damages by sheer persistence as a pest.

While he has now moved to his own blog because he's banned here, he can't seem to "get a life" and focus on his own issues, he makes sure to harass me on the SL forums by arguing pointlessly -- and falsely -- against my points, and pretending I'm "misinformed" on the SL blog discussion merely because I rightly and properly criticize third-party viewers for cause. His obsession with me isn't just the usual failed-male obsession one finds on the Internet; it has tacit corporate support, at the very least.

Let me focus on one insidious and duplicitous thing that this grubby little manipulator is doing now -- and doing on behalf of his company, IBM, which indeed does this sort of thing, because they can, and because they can do it without fingerprints by letting Dale say he doesn't represent them, and by never saying that he doesn't represent them *themselves*, as senior officials.

What Dale is doing now is campaigning for landmarks to be removed by pretending to support my campaign for keeping them -- a nasty, duplicitious little fucktard thing if there ever was.

Yes, he is "signing the petition" -- which has less than 100 people and will likely never get more than 1,000, so he knows it won't make a difference and costs nothing to sign. Yes, he's nominally pretending to be "for" landmarks on his blog -- but look closer.

He's actually using the *shell* of those distractive faux-supportive gestures to make three very, very insigious points that he is spiking his support-punch with, knowing they will very effectively go to people's heads:

a. The Lindens didn't really say they were going to get rid of landmarks and we don't know they are going to do this and their attempts to do this before are known, but buried in an old outdated design document -- that's his way of discrediting my concern which he pretends to share -- and it's his way of making the point more palatable for his ultimate message: "The Lindens maybe aren't really doing this." (Of course they *are*, and M Linden's tell-take "you can *still* trade destinations" lets us know that with its "still" -- it implies that landmarks indeed WILL be removed, and in its place will only be bookmarks and pasting of URLs.

b. The Lindens are saying they will have one-click travel which will obviate the need for landmarks and this makes SL like the Web -- by reaffirming this, Dale is cleverly making sure that even if he says he's "not for" webifying SL, the point gets through

c. But here's the money graph for what insidious Dale Innis is doing: he's saying that *third-party viewers will be able to go on using landmarks unless the Lindens make some big server-side change so use third-party viewers if you want to preserve landmarks*.

See, that's what this propaganda package was all about, so you'd swallow the whole fake-support thing hook, line, and sinker, and come out spouting "We need third-party viewers" -- something that IBM itself supports enthusiastically, because that way, they can tinker with what they need to tinker with and not rely on the slow and erratic passage of SL's iterations from its inhouse coders who often get mixed reviews from the IBM staff in their know-it-all private asides to you. By celebrating third-party viewers, IBM also harvests all the free labour out there they need to do all their R&D for them.

So those of us who have no desire to be stampeded into less safe, less customer-serviced viewers are told to go to them if we want a feature like landmarks, and basically shut up about trying to get the Lindens from climbing down from it ideologically on 2.0.

Dale's manipulativeness and smarmyness in doing all this ought to be readily on display, but you can be sure that a fair number of people will read this and say "Nothing to fuss about, Prokofy is likely wrong and merely panicking or FUDing, and we should just use third-party viewers anyway -- and we can believe this message because Dale supported Prokofy's petition, so he must be sincere."

Snort.

(BTW, fascinating to see the stampede of blog posts all of a sudden favouring Imprudence as Emerald falls out of favour.)

I've already deal with Dale's decidedly creepy support of the BDSM child ageplay here in this post, but let's ponder this whole Dale thing a little more closely for a minute with incident no. 2.

"Unfortunately, Social Media Has People In It"

Sometimes, I feel as if that's what the big companies like Telstra are saying when they are disappointed in Second Life, and say they are happy they did this experiment, but now they're going to go play with other social media like Facebook or Twitter -- where, essentially, what happens is that the masses who click on their account or their fan pages or their ad don't need as much hand-holding.

Yes, this could sound like I'm judging them as heartless beasts and anti-people, but actually, I am merely appreciating what they have to do as I know from experience: they can't make BANK, they can't get the people to pay so they can make BANK, and they have to move on because they need to meet their costs. They're a business, *and that's ok*. So far governments aren't handing out grants to help people run sims for cybering or even for reading poetry. When governments do give grants for virtual worlds, it is for prototyping educational or military models that feed some exigency of the state that isn't necessarily for the ordinary consumer -- and they have some budgets they can waste on it. Businesses don't have that luxury.

A lot of new social media tends to behave like old media in that the masses that accumulate around it are pretty maintenance-free -- they point and click and watch. They are content to see what the 2-10 percent of people on the power curve who make content do, and watch them, along with the rest of the 90-98 percent of people.

Second Life, even with its great capacity for anonymity and creativity, doesn't mask the needs of people as well as other social media. In Second Life, they show up very much full-bore in real-time, and they are very much like that old Kurt Cobain song, "Here we are now/entertain us" -- and you have to try to overlook the "I feel stupid and contagious" part they were singing a minute ago.

Most people in SL if they've lasted beyond 30 days -- those one-out-of-ten orientation survivors -- are sort of self-starters. They know how to look for something and occupy themselves somehow, with clubs, malls, a show, friends, building or decorating their homes. Some may even go up to that more rarified Slintelligentsia level and become supporters of Amnesty or attend Metanomics lectures or have discussions about saving whales (although I don't think we bother saving them anymore, judging from the SL PC crowd).

Example. My ideal tenant is usually somebody with a name like Heather, dressed like a tart in bling, or Merideth, in sensible business outfits. Either of them is likely to know how to deed media already from working in a club or library, doesn't matter. Both of them have friends that they either poseball-sex with or painfully read Thinc books together with, waiting for the pages to read - again, same thing, from a landlord's perspective. They entertain themselves with the available SL cornucopia and I never hear from them, except to put their partners' in the door or remove stray prims that their fellow inconsiderate tenants put on their lots. They pay on time, they read instructions.

Or they are like Rod or Lawrence. Rod has a combination of undone pants with his boxers showing or a ripped or removed leg of his pants, tatoos and earings and jewelry and a steady stream of babes. They are either black urban in real life, or *pretending* to be black urban which is hip (some of these Rods are likely lily-white postal workers in Columbus, OH, but who is to know?) Lawrence is a mid-Western white boy (or perhaps an Asian in real life), thoughtful and poetic and belongs not only to Not Possible in Real Life but a lot of other impossible groups which provide opportunities to quietly get laid in SL while reading poetry. Whether they have house parties or poetry readings, it doesn't matter, they may not read instructions (females are better at reading instructions I find) but they *listen* in real time when you explain how to deed media or ban people. I never hear from them.

These are the people in SL that you can handle without breaking your own bank hiring staff and working them overtime. After minimal instructions or real-time hand-holding of the cursory sort followed up with reminders in notecards, they get it and again, you never hear from unless it is to remove the boyfriend who has become abusive from their doorway. They "get it" that SL requires them to fend for themselves. I provide lots to do in my land preserve and recommend this or that to people especially if they are new, but most people get along in SL by making a friend and hanging out at an event that suits their preferences, whether Neko or Nanowrimo.

Not so a hardcore, persistent percentage of people who flounder in Second Life. I would say they make up at least 20 percent of my customers, so that means they make up a far, far larger of people in the welcome areas and infohubs. These people can't get themselves going or entertained and have a hugely hard time of it due to language and cultural barriers. These people are like Gabriel and Estella, to make up a composite typical example, Brazilians or Portugese who cannot read the directions, refuse to use Internet online translators, and insist on only using their HUDs, which means they keep friending you and teleporting you relentlessly because their HUDS won't work unless you come in person and speak in room chat with them -- IM chat can't work on their HUDS (the HUDS cannot reach into the privacy of IM chat, and that's ok, but a major annoyance is that I can't take a HUD and get it to spit out a target language that isn't mine there in the room to me, so I can then paste that to somebody in IM if need be while I'm busy with lots of customers and can't fly personally to each one).

But it isn't just the HUDS, as you find out if you click on the their insistent teleport offers  -- they come from cultures of face-to-face, longer-taking transactions than the typical Northerner or Westerner who get the name "ice people" because their social transactions are short and practical and not social and extended.

So even if you hand-hold them for 30 minutes as you step through all the complexities of SL, you can't get it across. Usually they wind up being able to help each other ultimately from a language cohort, and use the New York immigrant self-help association method of networking around to help each other. So this time isn't wasted, as the time spent seemingly hopelessly misunderstanding Brazilians, due to HUD inadequacy and their own unwillingness to put in effort, *might* pay off because then they will bring in 10 of their friends to rent. And it isn't about picking on Brazilians here -- I cite them because they are a hardy and enthusiastic crew persisting in SL despite the language barrier but who still struggle and need help. I could substitute the term "Poles" or "Spaniards" or even "southern U.S." or "anyone younger than 21" for the same effect: there is a persistent category of poor folk, who for lack of education, ability, culture, whatever, cannot make it through the complexity of SL and need LOTS and LOTS of help.

Help that I and others cannot endlessly give them, given that we can at most expect to collect US $1.50 *per month* in a dirt-cheap dollar-a prim $150/150 prim weekly rental of 512 m2. Even if you were able to get 128 512 customers on a sim that you chopped up to that number (you can't, really), you'd still only collect $192 US from them, not quite enough to pay your mainland $195 tier.

Help that even volunteer systems cannot provide if they hope to succeed helping more people rather than less, without burnout.

So the brutalities of Mainland Math, as I've called it, catch up even with big companies like Telstra. They can't make it work. Unless they can count on the 80 percent of their customers who don't need hand-holding to pay for more expensive condos at the rate of 90 percent occupancy or better per month, they can't make money --- and they can't make money even doing that, as the help you have to hire even for those self-motivated ones cuts significantly into the profits, and what winds up burning them out and wasting your customer service budget is the 20 percent -- who wind up not paying for more expensive content and rentals anyway.

They may wind up leaving SL for cheaper and more easy-to-use social media like Youtube or Facebook, and so you as a company *leave, too* as it is easier to care for that persistent 20 percent of "poor folk" out there in social media land where they are aggregated in masses  you can scale and monetarize and customer-serve easier.

I realize that companies like Telstra are scraping data and doing various technical capers that are all very complex. They had some scheme to give people discounts on their Internet usage or something that I don't understand (unless LL gave them the metrics of log-ons which they'd be unable to capture fully themselves even with intrusive third-party viewers like Emerald -- so probably that's how it worked). Telstra wanted to study how you deal with customers -- and now they know. They know something that will be in a perfect-bound 122-report for the board meeting with Powerpoint and CDs that cost them tens of thousands of dollars to discover, but Prokofy could have put it on a notecard to them for $25/US an hour:  Merideth and Rod can entertain each other, although they will need some help now and then due to virtuality exigencies, but Gabriel and Stella cannot and need constant staffing.

Rebuttal of ING -- Youarenot Credible; and IBM Employee Dale Innis Justifies "Victimless Edginess" of Ageplay

I'd don't like to have to crusade on the ageplay subject in SL -- it's offensive and reprehensible and involves endless arguments with the ethics-challenged. It simply seems necessary to go a number of rounds sometimes, however, because otherwise they keep gaslighting and keep distorting reality.

The climate in SL on this subject is indeed amoral and the Lindens are very much to blame for this. The original Linden tolerance of sexualized ageplay as long as there wasn't actual RL child porn prior to 2007; and later their very dilatory and conflicted revision of this policy to a rule that does not tolerate any sexualized ageplay, even fictional/virtual -- a rule that apparently has all kinds of exceptions; and the current Linden indulgence of the edgecasers like Marianne McCann, who insists on child avatars on Zindra, and this other creep who insists on BDSM attire for child avatars lets us know that the Lindens have not shaken off their ethics-free past on this yet and are so surrounded by a local political reality of political correctness that they do not see that this is not acceptible to the mainstream and will ultimately be harmful to their project.

What's extraordinary about this incident whereby Arch Linden purportedly gives the go-ahead so that "kids can kink" (ugh) is that the Lindens provide such rapid and detailed jurisprudence on a governance matter which they never, ever, ever, do. It took repeated visits to office hours and confrontation after a rape of a tenant in Ravenglass by a Woodbury regular, Blak Hax, now permabanned (but back on alts) to wrest even this cynical read out of the TOS from Michael Linden, formerly of the G-team; generally, the Lindens simply will not give these kinds of read-outs so that they are never, ever committed to anything and have very wide latitude. So that they were willing to give exegesis of ageplay latitude is stomach-turning.

One has to be very persistent in continuing to go back and back again with someone as manipulative and dysfunctional as Ing -- it's just a job that has to be done. I notice that Lias Leandros has been tide up in knots for six months on this and that the entire board at SL Citizen is hooting and hollering about this, but ultimately all that is a commentary on the sinister manipulativeness of Ing, and not the others.

Fact: Img is on the record as admitting to having a child avatar. So it really beggars the imagination to now suddenly construe the "little woman" character now as not an edgecasing child.

Fact: Img has removed the screenshot of himself presenting as a child avatar with a ball gag in her mouth on sluniverse.com -- we all saw that.

Fact: Alisha Matova did tell me that Ing sat next to her in SLCC.

Speculation: that Ing got an apology from the Lindens. We only know that from him. It seems outrageous, and yet, possibly true just because it sounds like the other read-out that this other odious character got.

Why are the Lindens so eager to bless ageplay?!

So what are we to make of this?

Of course, it's quite possible that I got something wrong in retelling the story from Alisha (unfortunately, while I saved the chat I can't locate it), but it was such a striking story that I surely don't think so; it's possible she got something mixed up, too (i.e mixing up a *supporter* or Ing with Ing himself) and it's also possible that this is really only about her tenants who have some unexplained reason to back up Ing for personal reasons or on principle or who the hell knows. Anyone is welcome to ask Alisha. I think it likely that she simply won't comment as it is "bad for business". The episode is very, very peculiar, because she most definitely told me that she met Ing at SLCC, and yet here we are with Ing claiming he wasn't there, and couldn't go there for some odd reason even being in the area. Frankly, I'm more inclined to believe Alishe than Ing.

Again: Ing is not someone I had any reason to start a jihad on, merely because he had an odious child avatar. I don't crusade against such creatures unless they directly interfere with my SL, either through griefing, attempting to rent, etc.

Ing came on at least three occasions on two sims to events that were public and were deliberately and methodically griefed by Woodbury as is amply documented. In fact I found him in the ban list without even recalling specifically that he was banned on at least one occasion simply because when 3 out of the 6 Woodburies coming start harassing you with spewing particles, memes and self-replicating prims, it is simply good event management to remove from the parcel and/or sim every single person wearing the Woodbury tag or with Woodbury in their groups.

The first time I banned Ing from Sutherland, he responded with those smirky little inverted hashmarks and said "Sorries that was quick" which meant he understood perfectly well why he was banned -- because he was with Woodbury. Duh!

As for the "UK' thing, that may merely be a conflation with Gareth, another big fan of ageplay, a creep, and an autism patient -- but not associated with Woodbury. I have no idea how Ing came to be associated with the UK but it isn't important. If the mistakes in the recounting of this person's bio includes things like

o not in the UK

o did not in fact attend  SLCC

o has an apology from LL

that means NOTHING as to the core set of issues with this lying and conniving inividual: he is manipulating the system to try to edgecase and gain respectability as part of a concerted campaign.

That LL would send an apology over a mistaken ban is really an alarming statement because it means they are under pressure from some powerful force making them do that. Given that mainstream public opinion is definitely against the creepy sexualized children in SL and definitely against the BDSM child and doesn't accept that its "non-sexual" representation doesn't in fact make it broadly offensive, then I have to conclude that LL is specifically under some kind of blackmail. Indulgent liberal sensibilities is not enough to explain this.

Some day we'll get to the bottom of the Woodbury story, which involves somebody somewhere "getting to" the Lab, as you can see by their inability to permanently ban these people as individuals and as a group.

Now, some more rebuttals: