MyTime

What is the secret wellspring of inflation in Second Life? I offered prize money for this secret at several events, and had no winners.

Answer: MyTime -- Unbilled. The sheer number of hours that often highly-skilled and educated people are willing to sink into this collective server farm in the sky.

Most people keep staring at me blankly when I say that. (Of course, that may be due to the fact that our little avatar faces can't make the kind of expressions yet that we see in Bells & Spurs!)

The other day, a woman with the last name of "ACS" (a special last name created just for the Anshe Chung Studios) got on the horn on the gigantic group list Dreamland Citizens. I don't know if anybody realizes that just the Dreamland Continent population now is about 500 people. Actually, I have as many in all my groups, but whereas my tenants include newbies paying next to nothing or people renting $25 walls, Anshe's people at a minimum something like $55 to get a deed access at the lowest cost, and then they pay $25 USD a month for a 4096 m2 chunk of server space.

The combination of her real money and play money has enabled Anshe to hire staff -- and gosh, does she need them with more than 125 private islands with dozens of special themes, builds, and activities. Dreamland is really another world, one of the many Third Lifes beyond Second Life where you are promised freedom from lagging, griefing, and ugly builds by stupid neighbours in exchange for harsher rules, summary executions from membership lists, and a black void to gaze at beyound your mini-island at the edges of the sim.

So here's the rub: this woman is Chinese, seeing as how the natural thing for Anshe to do is to go back to her homeland, where her SL riches -- which might seem huge to us but aren't really that much for running something that requires the labour this empire does -- simply extend a lot farther.

Ms. ACS is struggling...obviously her English is limited. She is dealing clearly with some kind of computerized scheduling system and merely cutting and pasting. So her message, unformatted and mispoken, comes across something like this:  "9:00 PLEASE TO GET 46,86,27 CENTRAL PARK ALL FREE WELOMCE"

Inevitably, people start gently ribbing this poor dear and also lob off the usual predictable Internet Theory of Fuckwadery like "Hey, can I come naked?" etc.

"Say," I IM to this list. "She's earning a living wage...Are you?"

You could have heard a pin drop on that list. There wasn't a single reply. Because deep in the gnawing souls of each and every person on that list, some of whom are SL's known content creators, was the realization that no, they aren't earning al iving wage.

The reason they aren't earning one is that there isn't one to be had in this inflationary world where not only is MyTime is free, MyProduct is often free, too.

When David Linden talks about SL being a monetarized socializing platform, he knows full well that while there is monetarizing and socializing to the tune of $250,000 USD in turnover a day now, nobody -- and I mean nobody -- is earning a wage like *he* is earning a wage in RL. That is, if there are a tiny handful of one or three like Anshe Chung and her husband, sure. But the overwhelming majority of people in SL making money are NOT making a living -- unless you call "making a living" living in a trailer in Kenosha.

It's not just that there isn't enough of Anshe to go around, it's that her RL time just really isn't billable at RL rates. That is, in RL, she could be teaching, selling real estate, or handling helpdesk complaints, and making more per hour in Germany, among the wealthiest countries of the world, than she can in SL -- when you factor in that a lot of her wealth is the latifundista type -- land rich and cash poor, with land or cash that were you to attempt to liquidate it all at once, you'd only end up depressing your own market.

We'd all like to believe that our time in SL isn't really like Real Life Time. We'd like to think, like the children going through the wardrobe to Narnia, that all the years of time we spend in SL "don't count" against the clock in Real Life. We might disappear beyond the Lamp Post and rule realms as kings and queens in SL, but when we come back, the meter is still running on our apartments, our mortgages, our kids' tuitions, our grocery bills. We can tell ourselves that we spend only hobby-like time in SL, evenings and weekends, but in reality, if we punched a clock or were handed a list of our log in hours, we probably would be astounded. If you are doing customer service work in particular, the amount of time you spend every day even while doing something else taking care of emails or popping in to fix something sure adds up.

So RL time is really what we do spend here, and we spend it like drunken sailors on leave. Almost any endeavour in SL requires huge layouts of picky, cranky work -- whether you are in build mode or PSP mode or parceling mode. It's a time suck!

People I've tried to explain this insight to often are puzzled. Let me try to give some examples.

Here's a post from Shaun Altman:

Camping: L$285 in 15.833 HOURS!
$1.00 USD: L$285 in 1 minute or so!
The time and hassle here are so far apart that it's just rediculous. 15.833 HOURS of someone's time is not worth $1.00 USD? This just CAN'T be.

He's finding it hard to understand how someone would have some 16 hours in the day to sit in a camp chair to earn what they could use $1.00 US merely to buy. Answer: they have little or nothing to do in their other windows, and can keep an avatar on doing that; they are students; they are housewives; they are disabled persons on pensions; they are partly-employed or self-employed with either disposable income or time or both; they are gaming addicts -- camp chairs often go together with the hope of winning big at a casino.

Let's say I see somebody sink the Linden down to 300/$1.00 US. Let's say my tier is due that day. I could look at the LindEx and spend the day fuming and plotting and switching packets trying to sell my $100,000 or whatever at that price to pay tier; I could pay tier out of my bank account and keep Lindens; I could just cash it out merely to get the bill paid and not think about.

What circumstances would enable me either to be the kind of person who could offer their Lindens for 300? Answer: a person who either has so many Lindens they need to get at least some out, or a person for whom the $35 or $50 US that they might lose by not waiting is completely insignificant -- mere lunch or a cab fare or movies or something they just don't care to think that much about.

If I bill $50 hour RL, the thought of sitting on SL for 16 hours either to get a camp chair payout or to prevent a LindEx loss or to find some bargain from hunting just aren't justified. 16 x $50 is $800. It's not going to be possible to care about the $1.00 or $10.00 that might be "saved" in SL by sinking time into it.

Time is available to sink -- but only so much! Many people take out of their sleep budget, exercise budget, family togetherness budget to meet their SL time clock demands. It's more "fun". Or is it?

Yes, the Lindens, like other game manufacturers figured out that the way to get the job done on user content and fresh content of any kind is to get people providing it for free, otherwise the cost is too high.

Philip Linden, speaking for Google recently, rhapsodizes about the bright Third-World kid who somehow gets on broadband, logs on to SL, makes a kick-ass weapon of some sort, sells it to Americans for a sum that will feed him and his family for a week, and lift himself out of developing-world destitution.

It's part of his dream of a Better World, and it's compelling.

Of course the social/psychological/cultural substrate to sustain that kind of innovation might be missing from both the Third World country, the under-educated kid in that country, and SL itself. No matter. The Tsar of Stream, the Pan of Panopticon forges on, blasting away any inconsistencies.

The culture that might come in on the heels of such a bright kid might be replete with beliefs in horrid, rigid hierarchies, injustices, even torture. It might involve readily subordinating oneself to restrictive ideologies, totalitarian systems, stifling credences. No matter. In the isolated space of the Internet/third world/game nexus, Content Creator is King, and a disembodied mind and hand and eye that can cheaply produce a product for Westerners greedy for content online will not be studied too closely.

I've had ample experience from SL and RL to conclude that far from ending the clash of civilizations, virtual worlds will enhance them.

Comments

[jauani]

prok this is an excellent point.

i thought of this in regards to the prefab market but it really does apply to sl at large. the inworld economy is a game economy and a lot of people are just happy to make stuff for free.

"mytime" is so often invested at little or return, and it always will by so many since this is a game. i think more than anything other than stipends, this is the biggest factor in the sl economy yet it is so rarely discussed.

[Pingviini Saarinen]

I still have a difficult time wrapping my mind around the fact that there are so many people bored and well-to-do enough to waste money on subscription-based computer games, even those where the lion's share of content is actually provided by the game manufacturer.

SecondLife however, the game where people pay-to-work rather than pay-to-play, completely eludes me.

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, regardless of whether you can wrap your mind or not, millions of people do this, and game companies and their partners, the junior game devs, are making money from this desire for entertainment.

The reason many people go to online games or virtual communities is that their real lives are not enough. It's fashionable among the electronic elite, anyway, to dump on these people as having "no lives". But in the same fashion, huge movements of exploration, like travel along the Silk Road or voyages to explore the New World or migration to the Wild West or immigration to America have been fueld by people with "no lives" who weren't content to stay in their stifling, dead-end, or even murderous RL communities, and looked for something better.

People wouldn't exist on all the continents if it weren't for that impulse to find something better. I imagine when the first hunter-gatherer wandered off in search of a green pasture and decided to settle down and build and farm, his fellow hunter-gatherers laughed and pointed their fingers and said he "had no life" and was becoming sedentary and losing his edge in hunting animals. Perhaps these instincts are hard-wired.

People's desire for meaningful work is tremendous. People like to find a way to work and pay even for something like their online entertainment. Those who can understand that camp chair sitters are actually hard labourers -- unskilled labourers trying desperately to make it in a highly stratified economy -- will be the ones to figure out some other more meaningful and lucrative occupation for them. A camp chair sitter isn't lazy -- a camp chair sitter is someone who feels terribly guilty and beholden to the world's economy, and whose Calvinist conscience is bothering him tremendously. He can't just buy and take entertainment like a new car or cool outfit. He feels he must *exchange his time* -- his work -- for this privilege and pleasure. He feels he at least has to go chain himself to a chair and hold his avatar there, motionless, and not fly around and enjoy things, because otherwise, he'd be getting "something for nothing". Getting "something for nothing" in fact, for our Calvinist camp-chair sitter, would be merely running up a charge on his credit card, like he might run up a charge for dinner or a movie. He doesn't want *all* his online experience to be like that!

That's why to try to kill this phenomena of camp chairs and yard sales is deadly, and the Lindens have to resist all the naysayers and Net Nannies on the forums. These dedicated worker bees willing to drone-sit for hours for a slave wage need to have their desire to contribute to the economy harnessed, not oppressed.

[jauani]

it's only work based on ones perception. when we talk about the sl economy it is thought of as work. but for those who play sl as a hobby or game, it is a creative release. in that regard, i really don't see the difference between knitting, baking cookies, model trains, television or second life.

[Pingviini Saarinen]

Likening MMO gamers to explorers seems like a mighty stretch - sports clubs for people more in love with their couch rather than a tennis racket or a football is what I'd offer for a comparison (though both fall short of the actual spectrum of personalities I know to be playing, which seems incredibly wide).

And yes, sure, MMO games are a hobby, what else could they be. As the trend goes, an ever more expensive and time-intensive hobby, too. A luxury item, were it not for the fact that very many participants are quite far away from having a Porsche parked in their garage. An addictive legal living-room drug then, maybe?

Finally: If these calvinist chaircamping slaveworkers really exists, it might actually be probably in their own best interest to not be harnessed in SL and instead shown the door - towards a completely different, perhaps less self-destructive pastime.

[Prokofy Neva]

Pingviini, you seem rather judgemental of people and their leisure pursuits or not-so-leisurely pursuits. This is just to deny reality. After people fanned out and explored terrestial space, they went to outer space but that turned out to be hard, expensive, and deadly. Nowadays, they explore the inner space of virtual worlds. You may morally disapprove, but your moral scale isn't one they accept.

Because MMORPGs are indeed a hobby and entertainment, and an increasingly sophisticated and expensive one, there will be a small percentage of people who can figure out how to make a living providing services to this sector -- they're the Tilt-a-Whirl guy earning $3.87 an hour. That in turn begins to make a more complex economy.

[Pingviini Saarinen]

I just disagree with the explorer metaphor because it simply doesn't hold. The sort of exploration you mention involved real hardship, an uncertain future, taking existential risks and, in most cases, completely severing ties with the explorers' previous lives - if anybody could be rightfully called explorers in the context of SecondLife, it's perhaps Philip & the employees of Linden Lab.

Apart from that, maybe it *is* a good idea to sit back and reflect about the unbilled MyTime spent on MMOGs in a more fundamental way than just its influence on the virtual economy. If not for the morals, then at least for the money.

[Cocoanut]

You're right, Ping, about people working on the game, and I don't know why I do it. Except it's a hobby, and a creative one.

But your description of rl explorers actually fits the SL working person, too! lol

You're exactly right on the camp chairs, Prok (and the yard sales). You left out, though, why these get criticized so much by some.

It's just another way for those some to point out how superior they are yet again.

coco

[Prokofy Neva]

It's not only that they want to point out that they are morally or intellectually superior to those in yard sales or camp chairs -- that would be one cultural and philosophical issue we could address more handily.

It's that they acquire a zeal and a hateful vengeance against these people and want to kill them and nerf the game around them because their diligence, thrift, endurance, and stubborn seeking of money in exchange for their time runs right up against their creator fascism.

The creator fascist wants to spend the absolute least amount of time relative to how many copies he can keep selling of his product, forever and ever, Amen.

His labour, however skilled, ceases at the moment he packs his vendor. It's like anything in human history, this ability to work, but then never work again and yet charge a fortune without any costs of time, labour, materials or property (SLEX and SLB) ensure that not even property is needed!).

Historically, hordes of young men not employed on the land or in urban factories aimlessly running around with time on their hands that no one will exchange for them inevitably lead to extremist movements, crime, revolutions, wars.

That's why we have the nasty environment we do in some parts of SL, ranging from the common shooter-griefers of the sandboxes to the vicious mind-fuck type griefers of the forums. People with absolute no need to exchange their time, people who's MyTime stock is endless, because their one-time creation just keeps selling out of the vendor, forever, and ever, Amen.

[Cocoanut]

"The creator fascist wants to spend the absolute least amount of time relative to how many copies he can keep selling of his product, forever and ever, Amen."

You know, I've noticed that, too. And for myself, there are certain tactics and formulas I could employ to better achieve that, too.

But - there would be less creative challenge to it. There was a house place I looked at the other day - "Out of Time," I believe it was called - and I was impressed with how different the builds were from one another, even though, I believe, they were done by the same person. (I thought they were all priced too high, though.)

This was someone who apparently looked at almost every house as a chance to try to do something different, and she managed to achieve that difference in and of herself - if indeed, she made all the builds.

Of course everyone is going to have a certain style; I'm talking about maximum variety within that style.

Then, too, every house to me is its own person. Some of them are crankier than others, and they don't all live up to their potential, but they are all individuals, worthy of my total and particular attention.

I've gathered, though, that a lot of people go for the holy grail of making one thing,or maybe a few versions of that same thing, and then selling it over and over again, thus maximizing their profit for their time spent.

They can talk about how particular they are with achieving a level of excellence, working hard, etc., all they want, but I still see - hey, you just basically made one thing! haha

My balance is not as profit-oriented, and is also heavily influenced by pleasing the customer, and stretching myself creatively. But then, that formula has been true of my real life, too, and it took me to the top there, so it's probably just as valid, if not more so.

coco

[Prokofy Neva]

The person who does Out of Time, if I'm not mistaken, is madison gardner. She does excellent work, and has gotten better and better since I started buying her houses. She has a partner, Azrael Rubio, and they work on the houses together sometimes I think but they appear to have different styles.

She's worked hard at getting good camera angles, stairs that work better, privacy, spas that don't look awkwardly placed, etc.

BUT, I refuse to buy from her anymore. Because she refuses to put her product on no mod/copy/no transfer but sells only single copies of the house.

This is absolutely inexcusable to me, and I fight back in the only way I know how to as a big consumer of houses: not by boycotts, which I think aren't justified and aren't effective, but by simply personally refusing to buy their product.

It's especially annoying when she charges the prices she does $5000 or something for a house -- and yet they delink after rezzing.

DUH I know how to keep them in edit-mode while placing and DUH I know how to create the yellow box around them to pick them up.

But like Lewis Nerd very helpfully and accurately stated in the forums, the yellow box is overrated and often doesn't work.

Geeky architects love to tell you that in fact the yellow box works. Um. yeah. That's because it works *that one time* that they use it to *box up their product in a vendor and forget about it*.

Then when I take it out, it sometimes somes unloose. With prim drift, with the lumpy land in SL, with all the lag and shit, putting out a house can often lead to it disintegrating on impact. You know have 237 prims of house, all delinked. While *some* of these might sell at a yard sale, most remain forever in your lost and found folder named Object (architects are beligerent about keeping everything named object for some wacky reason) and you don't delete them because you think some Saturday afternoon you're going to find the time to put them all together again.

I had a huge ruckus with madison over this issue. She gave me one back-up copy the first time I lost a $3000 or $5000 house from delinking. But then she refused to give me any more. Perhaps she theorized that I was going to "illegally" rent out multiple copies of her house. Of course, that would be silly, because the more competent prefab creators simply don't care. They put their prefabs on no mod/copy/no transfer. You yourself can endlessly put out their prefab and rent out multiple copies. What do they care? You give them free display/advertising space! Often tenants who rent buy their own land, then go and seek the prefab maker to buy the same house. They realize it's a way to sell houses, not lose sales. Most landlords aren't going to put out 10 identical houses because most peole hate living in cookie-cutter places like that and want more diversity.

So in order to have me keep buying $5000 houses with every model she comes out with, madison gardner would prefer to be a creator-fascist and keep charging me that PER COPY, without any awareness that if I actually spend fifteen or twenty US RL dollars on a product that cannot even ensure me one month of rent to pay for it before I have lose it completely merely because customers want a different house, then...I just stop buying those houses.

Ditto Gene Jacobs. I spend literally hundreds of dollars on the single-editions of his different models, since they are popular and I like them. But I then was stuck with never being able to move them! I lost probably half of them in delinkages. I asked for replacements, and he refused to give them, giving me only a shallow discount on further copies.

This is the kind of stuff I simply denounce publicly in my blog. I think it's wrong. If people have a product that breaks on impact, as all complex houses do in SL, even in edit mode, then I'm sorry, you shouldn't buy their products! Putting it into a yellow square named Object -- I'm sorry, that's not a solution. More than half the time, I put that yellow-squared Object out again when the customers change and whoops, I have a house that has completely become misaligned and unusable, Lewis is right. They're wrong.

[Schwartz Guillaume]

Why is that you rate someone's worth in SL solely by the amount of money they let you make? It's maddening.

[Cocoanut]

Very interesting info, Prok. Yes, it was Madison Gardner.

Two designers would account for some of the good variation in those homes, but even with two, there is good variation. (There are some places where they have forgotten to texture parts correctly, though.) And they are very interesting, beautiful, and creative houses, too.

No copy? Are they transfer? Mod/transfer?

No copy is the kiss of death for houses, however inexpensive or expensive they may be. You simply cannot expect customers not to run into some difficulty at some point, whether putting the house out, or moving it, or in the case of mod houses (which mine are), in attempting to redecorate.

I entirely agree with your philosophy about people putting multiple houses out. This nice guy once IM'd me with some advice about my critter houses. He pointed out that someone could have a rental critter area, say, and put out dozens of my 'Lil Cat House or whatever.

He urged me at length not to allow copy on my houses for this reason. I listened and agreed with him that that was a possibility.

But I figure that if someone wants to put out 16 'Lil Cat Houses, the advertisement alone is worth it. And most people aren't renting out lots of houses, anyway, and when they do, they tend to want a variety anyway.

coco

[Cocoanut]

P.S. Yes, the yellow-box thing is great, but definitely not fail-safe.

Moving and turning a large house is always tricky, especially if you have a bumpy landscape. House builders should be aware of that.

[Lasivian Leandros]

Actually, how do you know she's earning a "living" wage?

And do you consider the millions of Chinese toiling in factories that are getting paid less than the Chinese minimum wage to be earning a "living" wage?

[Prokofy Neva]

No, Coco. They are no mod/no copy/no transfer -- classic creator-fascist trifecta.

I could understand either mod/copy/no transfer -- if I can copy it, it should not be for resale.

I could understand no mod/copy/no transfer -- architects like to retain their vision.

Or I could understand what some do like Ingrid Ingersoll -- mod/no copy/transfer -- modify it for your use, or sell it -- but then she charges $200 or $500 a piece, not $5000, so that if I mess up, another $500 to buy another copy is not so onerous.

But to put out a hugely expensive house with no copy is just the pits. On the Gene Jacobs one, at least I have transfer, and I'm trying to sell them because I don't want to use them when they break like that -- someone more skillful or whatever, or who is sure they won't need to take them in and out of inventory, could buy them from me at a yard sale for half price.

I once had a rental area with Tinies, remember? It didn't do so well because it unfortunately wound up positioned to this mafia guy's house who kept getting himself fireprim bombed and the fire would displace all my tenants' prims back to inventory.

I put out one copy of each style, including yours, as you may recall. Why would I have them all identical when I was striving for a village look? But even though I put out just one copy of one item to rent, this one girl selling them took a hissy fit. She somehow felt there was something evil about me renting out my one copy of her house. Or she suspected I'd rent out more, although not only is there nothing wrong with it, I didn't have more than one out. People are amateurs, and hysterically aggressive amateurs, in SL.

If some house maker feels they are somehow justified in alienating a rentals agency by forcing them never to buy from them again at all (which is what they do with me when they can't put houses on copy), for the sake of hobbling them to keep them from renting out multiple copies, well, they can do what some doors salesmen do, or others with things like teleporters: bundle them into a prim for a bulk sale. So I can buy 100 doors, let's say, and not run out of them for awhile, and they can give me a bulk discount.

Lasivian, why don't you just stay with that line of persnickety literalist tekkie reasoning? Run it up the flag pole and see if anyone salutes. Float the boat and see if it sinks.

Anybody dialing into SL with enough bandwidth to see the game is probably not so poor, actually, and yet if they are in China doing this, they are likely to benefit from play-money salaries. This is just generally true. I wonder if you have ever been outside the continent United States, and ever lived in any foreign countries. I'll bet even getting to the supermarket in the next county might be a challenge, I dunno, based on your wierd-ass literalist comments.

It's a fact of life that Westerners providing factories, jobs, opportunities to those millions toiling in factories in China or Russia or India are providing them with more money than their own countries do. Their own countries are often deeply fucked in many places from years of dumb-ass murderous communism of the sort that came to them from tekkie literalism.

So yeah, it's a plus. It's not really our responsibility to also ensure them a standard of living equal to what they'd get in America, or to ensure that they can "live" on this wage, when it's a fair bet that they can, given the discrepancies. These countries all have evil, vicious, anti-labour policies despite touting the working man and Marxism and all. So they need to change that. Virtual worlds and the whole Internet offer people opportunities. Indians and Russians and Chinese really doing this really appreciate it and seek these opportunities in droves. It's only white dudes in Marxist college campuses that get all angsty and hectory about exploitation and evil capitalism.

I don't think you'd even recognize a toiling Chinese factory worker if he bit you in the ass. Gosh, I hate facile electronic Leninism, it's so fucking stupid.

[Belaya Statosky]

'Pingviini, you seem rather judgemental of people and their leisure pursuits or not-so-leisurely pursuits.'

And yet, isn't what this blog is here for, in addition to your in-world commentary? You can't comprehend why anyone would run an IRC client 24/7 to provide services to a channel and make it so others may be able to reach you through the course of a day and leave messages and say as much.

You don't seem to much like what many seem to do in world or on their own blogs. You have this rather unusual standard you hold to other people that seems utterly inconsistent at times to both yourself and others seemingly on whim.

The tragedy of this is sometimes I've found you amusing on an actual honest, straightforward fashion with no sarcasm or irony involved. You've been capable of riffing with me, wordplay and the like that made me actually like speaking to you sometimes even if it was always under the guise of ideological enemies.

(The fact you're a Laurie Anderson fan both surprised [pleasantly at that] and confused me, since she's the prototype of the 'Tekki-Wiki'-whatever you seem to dislike -- from her body of work, to her interviews and to those she's associated with in life.)

Yet -- despite all of this, you make it very difficult to be around. You throw up these gigantic walls of anger and self-righteousness under various excuses, sometimes valid and sometimes seriously not. Any sort of point you're trying to make usually gets lost along the way due to this.

You cannot be judgemental and angry for the rest of your life and call it being 'reactionary'. Eventually you're going to either have to choose between living the rest of your life this way or taking the higher path and focusing on working around those who stand in your way instead of directly opposing them since at the moment you're seriously outnumbered in vocal support. Sun Tzu wouldn't consider this a wise strategy, either. Change your surroundings, move the battleground to somewhere difficult and out of their court -- don't even invite them to the party. Seiging their walled gardens is a long and costly operation and can and should be avoided if you're clever enough to acheive your goals another way.

Playing the 'Lurkers support me in email' card by saying the forums numbers are small, that you have many satisfied tennants, etc. isn't exactly valid because the venues you constantly return to and attack head on are these ones you're dismissing as unimportant -- the forums, SLOG, IRC, etc. IF they're not important, then display it by moving on to pressing issues that do not directly relate to them and do not give them mindspace. Sometimes you do do just that, such as asking for group reform, discussions of the economy that don't involve other people as the focal point of your work and the like.

Honestly, I'd like to see you keep that up because sometimes you have something to say that I'm not going to just 'ignore' because we're on opposite sides of the fence.

I am almost positive that you'll view this as an attack or otherwise completely disregard anything I've said here despite making an effort to be as constructive as possible. I don't expect you to change, but I am asking you to consider other options.

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, Belaya, the whole IRC mystique is beyond me, really. I'm glad you have fun with it. It seems pointless to me to be available or consider something needs to be active 24/7 that isn't related to, I dunno, emergency medicine or fire departments. In my experience outside of Geekworld, we use regular email or yahoo groups or other listserves that may not make us constantly talk to each other simultaneously but hey, that gives us more than say a nanosecond to digest the day's news and say something coherent. Whatever!

I guess like a lot of rock stars or whatever, I like her music, more than I especially like her or her politics. You can recognize that Superman, which I was fortunate to hear live years ago, is a work of art of the modern sort that might seem like alphabet soup at first but has some interesting things to say. Facile anti-American stuff about planes going to war or whatever I take as it comes, mindful that like many people in the world, they don't really have a clue as to whether the real war planes are concentrated.

It's not really important to me whether you find my style or manner or content valid or irksome or whatever. I have to follow my conscience on this. I find that in a number of settings you've had no sense of humour. And take yourself pretty seriously even when being oh-so-arch. All of you tekkie folks really have no capacity for self-examination. You all just think you are, "what we like to call...right...doing it...what we like to call..the correct way."

Your notions that I'm seriously outnumbered in vocal support is likely fallacious and based on that hall of mirrors you all live in where you just hear yourselves in an echo chamber and see an amplified version of your influence through those forums. But you don't represent anybody. Certainly not me, nor many people like me, or even unlike me.

And it wouldn't matter if people agreed or not. What's especially troublesome about your folks is that you are unable to conceive of multiplicity. There's only the seamless tekkie-wiki collective farm, the Gang, the Collective Mind, the group, the group-think. Either people have to "get with the program" or be ostracized. It's astounding, really, your blindness and tenacity.

Sun Tzu is irrelevant. Dissenters are very important. One thing even a lonely individual can do is keep documenting, and keep building a wall of shame around those who do wrong.

I never go to IRC. I have no interest in lurking on IRC. IRC is not material to my life. I realize this is hard to fathom. But it's just not.

SLOG is frankly another venue that I think probably has less readers than me LOL.

It's always fascinating to me how the Tekkie Wiki busybodies can put up their Ladies Auxiliary and send off an emissary like you to lecture me and wag the collective finger. It's too funny!

"Being constructive" isn't ranting on in the usual boring way about why it's wrong to be a dissenter (that's a hilariously losing battle with me), being constructive is replying as to whether you have sufficiently monetarized your time online or not.

[Belaya Statosky]

No one actually sent me, I'm here of my own free will. Honestly, most conversations I hear about you elsewhere aren't very interesting to me since it has a bit of a sameness to it that I find rather dull at this point and I do make it a point to say something when I think it's crossed a boundary.

Honestly, I don't think many who seem to actively dislike you in this 'group mind' you mention would even consider having this conversation with you. I could be wrong, I could be write and losing 'cool' points or whatever. I honestly don't care about that, though as for the moment I find this line of dialog to be interesting with you.

I certainly am not asking you to come to IRC, that'd not be productive for anyone involved nor do I think you'd ever like it. However, I will note that it's actually used as a cheap tool in many businesses I can think of as an intranet/inter-office communication tool, as well as cross-site communication in addition to instant messaging and emai, so it's not just in the domain of strictly Geekworld. LL runs their own internal IRC server, if memory serves, for example. Still, I really don't expect you to shift your attitude on that, either.

Anyway, this was about what I expected to hear from you -- you assigned me a catagory, shoved me in a box and filed it on a shelf even though it doesn't really apply to me, it makes you feel comfortable enough to do so.

So far as when I am serious and when I am not, that, like you have already said on your own mannerism -- is a matter of conscious. If you feel you must fight like this, then alright. I have made my own unpopular stands, some 'humorless' stands, etc. before, even if it meant alienation at times.

As to monetizing my time online, it's entirely possible to have a good paying job that allows or requires online usage, I've worked for several. However, what I choose to do beyond working hours is really up to me, isn't it? Ultimately it's about what a person finds fulfilling, I suppose. If I live at a comfort level I am pleased with, I don't need to maximize it for the sake of maximizing it -- both financially and other qualities of life.

But, anyway, I've said my piece and gotten my 'monetary value' out of this.

You likely do have more readers than SLOG, by the way.

[Belaya Statosky]

To refute myself: It's a matter of conscious for not using the word 'conscience', among several other lovely grammar errors that are already irking me.

[Prokofy neva]

Belaya, I suspect these people who "actively dislike me" never reflect much about anything, and just endlessly circle the wagons. I haven't seen an original idea or post or interesting comment in like -- forever. It just never comes. They rehash their same old whining about "bring us Havoc 2" etc.

IRC is just a chat room. If it were on Yahoo or AIM, you'd snicker and call it a chatroom. Because it's on something more geeky and was there back in the Year One before the Internet or whatever the hell, you all this it's cool. Every time I've gone on the SL channel, I just see people goofing off and spouting nonsense. The signal to noise ratio is not good. It's a place for people to goof off instead of working at work. I don't like the culture. I don't care if many businesses use it, or if the ultimate in geek businesses, SL uses it. In our world, it has assumed the role of being a pernicious back channel for people either to faun upon and gain favours for the game devs or gang bang them if they do something like announce they are deprecating the bounce script. I'm unimpressed.

Um, if there's a typo with conscience/conscious, so what? I do know the difference. Other grammar "errors" that may irk you may be some seldome-used or even seldom-argued point -- who the hell cares.

[Belaya Statosky]

I was correcting myself since it bugged me, s'all. Anyway, I'm not sure why either of us is seemingly fixated on IRC other than I was pointing it out as an example of where you were critical of someone's free time like you leveled against Ping, is all.

It is simply a tool, with all sorts of different chat rooms and folks using it. it also has a ton of flaws and dated issues related to it, pretty much like any chat program out there. I'm glad we can agree this much on the subject.

Anyway, yes there's rehashing from a lot of people. Over and over. Until anything that was remotely interesting about it has been bled dry. But I think I see a bit of that everywhere I go and I highly suspect I'm no different -- perspective can be a difficult thing sometimes.

Anyway, this at least ended somewhat civily, I'd like to think. See ya around, keep writing, etc.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm not fixated on IRC, I don't go there, and it matters not. If geeky junior game devs want to have a channel to talk to their five-minutes-ago-best-friend-turned Linden, well, geez, who could stop them? I view this as kinda like those geeky kids in 9th grade who went in the AV closet with Mr. Rogers in between bouts of tinkering with the Sex Ed filmstrips. I find it a little creepy, but if that's their thing, whatever.

I just wish we had *better* junior game devs who were educated in the Socratic method and the humanities. Their narrow technical focus and literalist phonetic training makes them poor managers of a society.

What I don't like about any rolling chat medium is the idiocy and goofiness and sheer assholery that people feel entitled to engage in. There was just less of that in the 19th and 20th centuries.

[Aliasi Stonebender]

Good points here. I can only say that I suspect for the bulk of SL users the time spent "working" in SL is not unlike the time an amateur musician spends on their craft, despite it being unlikely that they'll ever "make it big" - or the time gamers will plow into making fantastic mods and patches for their favorite games.

Which is to say, for many people it's only "work" if you're getting forced to do it; the possibility of material reward is secondary to personal satisfaction, whatever might bring it.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, Aliasi, it's all true, what you're saying, which is why it remains an elaborate hobby/entertainment and can't really create a "real economy" because so many people have no objective need to exchange their time for money to survive in any conceivable fashion.