Second Thoughts

PainPoint

PainPoint is a new program available from, um, I think Microsoft or some start-up that maybe MSFT is about to buy, I didn't quite get the specifics. Like PowerPoint, it's fairly easy to use, but dumbs down thought.

PainPoint is a fabulous new interactive software tool that enables you to manage your customers with alacrity and simulated concern and leads to optimalization of suppression techniques for massive customer conflict.

Here's how PainPoint works -- it's proprietary but has lots of customizable modules.

1. To get started, conceive of a drastic and painful measure that will boost your bottom line, and have the austere brilliance and will to execute it flawlessly, without divergence. If you have trouble coming up with ideas like this, we have another software package, Machiavelli, which enables you to prototype and map various YouRule scenarios that will help you devise the right decision.

2. Announce the harsh decision on a Friday night before the weekend when you have only a skeleton staff, or the night before you yourself leave on holiday.

3. Close comments on your corporate blog, and siphon comments off to a forums, which is heavily moderated.

4. Let people howl and scream and carry on about your harsh decision. Have some minions periodically arrive and say soothingly they are listening, or they sympathize, but they are waiting for instructions. Let the forums go for 1500 -- 2500 -- even 3500 entries is not too many for a PainPoint thread -- promise you will "read every one" and sound as if you mean it.

5. Allow existing or newly-created inworld groups to vent, complain, hate, screech, spread disinformation -- but strategically select one or two very visible community members who symbolize the issue and knock them down hard if they use the "F" word or step out of line. Then appear to have succumbed under community pressure to be lenient on that community leader's punishment -- or to blame a subordinate for the penalizing and apologize.

6. Hold an impromptu fireside chat, and strike a pose of weary contemplation and burden with the world's problems, soliciting "help" in "solving our mutual problem" from your angry customers, whom you now treat as bosom friends at your hospital bedside.

7. Externalize, globalize, universalize the problem. The problem isn't, say, evil leaders with bad policies on food or health care who cause little children to starve, the problem is "global hunger" or "poor nutrition" which is like the weather, and has no address or agent. Externalized forces of Nature like "lag" or "networks" or "the Internet bottlenecks" can be invoked as an agentless phenomenon, much like a hurricane, that we must "all work together as a community" to solve.

8. Divide the community. Figure out which responses are the most radical, which are the most moderate, and which are your most conservative loyal sycophants thinking your PainPoint decision is "right," and then play them all off against each other. You can maintain 24/7 capacity with PainPoint, which can quickly pull key words and repetitive phrases for you, tag community members, red-flag rabble-rousers and portray to you in real time a dynamic "picture" of "where this is all going". Plant firmly in everyone's minds the idea that "some people" have overused the resources and broken the rules and "sadly" we will "all have to pay".

9. Remain starkly silent when some community journalists attempt to play "gotcha" and "hypocrite" and try to accuse you of the very thing that you are accusing the community members of doing. Remain silent for a good long time. Let them blog, rant, rave, post Flickr photos. On about day 3, come forward and say, "But those were never openspace sims, those were full-prim sims, it's merely that our Moles prototyped them and built them on OS sims and moved them."

10. Use PainPoint's sentence-generating feature, which enables you to move the slider on "Vague" and "Unspecific" and "Future Points in Time" to come up with "solutions" that can spread along a continuum of "Maybe, If You're Good" to "Not On Your Life, Even Until the Heat-Death of the Sun". Make it appear that you are making a reluctant and even sorrowful "promise" that in fact states nothing whatsoever.

11. Continue to seed through long posts, chats, groups, blogs actual phrases that say exactly what you will do, which remains unchanging and unswerving from your PainPoint No. 1 state, but swathe them in yards of cotton batting that makes it appear as if you *might* change your mind.

12. Issue another blog or two that makes it appear that you have "backed down" after "considering the painpoints of the community" -- but change nothing.

13. You've now got a set of data that shows the community's key painpoints -- numbers, tags, vectors, profiles. You'll see a rich set of cues that will show you a) who will break b) when they will break c) why they will break d) what they will break over. At this point, you may want to adjust *one little thing* unrelated to your original harsh decision. This might be something like "we will provide you with new ways to monitor your OS performance so you do not overload the sim," but without changing a thing about the new pricing structure.

NotWorkingLife

I tried logging into the OpenLife web page again -- and couldn't. The template in the upper right-hand corner simply wouldn't. Yes, I allow pop-ups, cookies, java-script, yes I have Mosaic. The cursor lands in the middle of the box, you keep trying to type, and meanwhile it pulls up a screen I never saw before, with a name like "Microsoft X Docs" or something. I keep trying and trying, and it keeps trying to open up a document-like template and save a file...while I'm trying to *log in*. Right.

I try and try, finally logging in, press on the land store, and I arrive and show that in my shopping cart is the sim "Whiskey", which of course gives the lie to pyotr who claimed there were no sims for sale. I have no idea if I've been charged for it, but I try taking it out of my cart, and finally get it out. When I get back on the land page, I see it's gone, and in its place is another one called "Spice". I decide to try to buy it, it's only $89, mindful of Paisley's horrible experiences.

I buy it -- that is, I go through the screens, which this time, do have a country pulldown and don't ask for my Tax ID number. I believe that likely what happened before and which the owners never bothered to see or fix or understand, is that if you do NOT log in and go to the land store to buy, it doesn't prompt you to log in, it prompts you to fill out that huge template.

I went through all the screens, it took me then to PayPal, NOT giving me an option to use a credit card, which is fine, and then...nothing. No email saying "Congratulations, Prokofy Parvenu, you have become a Foundation Sim Owner!". Nothing. Not even a PayPal receipt. I waited, and about 8 hours later, I did get the PayPal receipt. Nothing else. No email. No notice, and I couldn't find the sim in world.

ClosedLife?

Quite a few people are flooding over to OpenLife Grid, and I was one of them today. I will be taking a very keen weather eye to this service, however, to see if it is the usual goofy and incompetent geek operation with lousy customer service we can expect in the opensource movement reverse-engineering Second Life -- or whether even being a pioneer, it can work with reasonable competence. I'll also be watching the forums very keenly to see whether the responses to my newbie help query are the usual smug, arrogant assholery, of the type "But I never had that problem, you must be retarded" or "there must be something wrong with your computer" or "I could help you but you can't be rude" blah blah blah. You can tell A LOT about a service on the basis of these simple tests -- and let me say, Linden Lab flunked them all when I came 4 years to SL, too, because the community they had enabled and supported at that time was nasty, snarky, belligerent, and sneering about newbie technical problems, and used social Darwinism to cull its ranks. I expect absolutely nothing less of new open sim communities -- if anything, the attitudes will be worse, redoubled with their sense of entitlement and hubris about escaping the evil Lindens.

I wasn't surprised to find that my name "Prokofy Neva" was seemingly taken there -- I find that in many places because goons get there first and grief me in this fashion. And that will be a test too -- whether the makers of OpenLife can fix that problem, or whether they take a Linden-like libertarian extremist position of saying, well, you didn't trademark the name, and everyone is free to chose their own name so blah-blah-blah. I took the name Prokofy Parvenu, because I won't stay long if I don't find reasonable access and service in a place like this -- service is paramount if you start a business and other people have to depend on you.

The template for trying to buy a sim is the most daunting thing I've ever seen on the Internet, even the U.S. government's electronic tax-payer site, that requires LESS information from me and has LESS repetition and frankly WORKS unlike this site. These idiots have you typing in the same information at least 4 or 5 times, very detailed, with MANDATORY cell, fax, etc. numbers and even "department' of your "company". They demand your tax ID number twice on each of the four repetitive templates -- it's insane. I've never seen a requirement to turn over a social security number for an $89 purchase on the Internet, even with recurring billing. It's not rational. These people are either paranoid freaks or amateurs -- the template is home-made or some sort of totally anal-retentive third-party biller, I think the former.

Worse, when I selected the $89 sim (yes, sims only cost $89 for 65536), I couldn't purchase it, even after filling out the ridiculous template. It kept telling me shopping cart was "empty" although of course...duh...I know how to select an item and click off a box showing that I want it into my cart. I refreshed...I struggled for a half hour, and then finally I wrote on the forums, "Hey, do you want to sell sims or not? Or do you want to keep it close"?

I landed on newbie island with a half dozen other newbs, in Ruth format. That's always annoying, but understandable. Unfortunately, appearance mode and its edit for body shape, etc. was stuck -- you couldn't get into it. I was glad to see there was a reasonably easy and workable downloadable viewer that puts you on newbie isle quickly, but I see in the forums lots of other people have problems. I crashed, and gave up for the day.

So here's what I had to say to these folks: hey, write when you want to sell me a sim. Make it easy. Otherwise, I will not be jumping over hurdles.

Jack Jacks the Jacks

Dear Second Life. All in a turmoil again over yet another price...er...adjustment. Clubside handed me two notecards this afternoon with a transcript of Jack Linden, popping into Concierge List to invite everyone to a "chat".

All of this feels so familiar. And I mean, not only from the last four years of going to various protests and seeing hundreds of people on sims with signs and anger. It's like those big demonstrations by the Manezh outside Red Square, where, fingers freezing, I would try to write a sentence on a reporter's notebook. The demonstrators would be bought off, because none of them could really get out from under the Kremlin -- they were too dependent on it for food and shelter and health care.

Shelter. You don't even really need a roof over your head or a house in SL, but everyone wants one, and that's ok! If the Lindens are trying out their usual method -- let's bomb them with a really harsh announcement, then see where the "pain points" are, and solve accordingly -- it may backfire this time.

The Lindens are really sandbagged with this one. Andrew "Throttle" Linden could have explained all this to us long ago. There are too many people trying to do too many things on the sims, but nobody wants to be the one to curtail them *with the software itself*. We've discussed billing by CPU usage for years, so that laggy clubs with 40 avatars nightly would pay more than the little old ladies who log on to their 512m2 on that sim on Sundays. But nobody wants to curb the users, because curbing users with inventory or script limits means curbing "creativity" -- and the Lindens are still in beta-test-love-fest sandbox mode -- even today, even with M Linden at the helm.

What a monster they'd create if they had discretionary examination of each and every OS sim, to see if it was "compliant" or not. I can see people taking off their poseballs when inspected, only to put them out again the minute the Inspector General rides on to the next oblast. "Oh, Second Life, where are you rushing?"

When I come out on a protest like today's -- and it's still going on late into the evening with people from all over the world, people who never post on a blog, or have blogs, or post on forums, or ever get in the news -- just people on SL -- I realize what a big disconnect there is between the Lab and its lofty aspirations of Better World sims with NPR-like activities, education, government, business meetings, all without scripts, and *these* people, blinged out in their best RP duds, prim hair enough to sink a sim, scripted heels and AOs and genitalia bringing the world to a crawl. It's like they aren't even supposed to be here, and yet they *pay* for the thing, while the other dream, the dream of all those primless but proper people from Eduworld or Bizworld doesn't quite materialize because they say that "telepresence" just doesn't cut it, when only an f2f will do, that walled gardens without firewalls aren't an acceptable solution.

On the other hand, nobody has experience in this. Nobody has ever managed the pricing and maintenance of pricing over time with a virtual world like this because nobody has ever made one. In that sense while we can all bang on Jack Linden for not managing this properly, what can you do? Either he sold the sims in good faith and other bean-counters at the Lab then began to crab about CPU, or he faced real opposition to trying to do anything about curbing users, or some other black-box event we can never know. Lessons learned from past civic disruptions like this? It's never enough notice -- this time it's 60 days, not 14, and it's never enough. And it's always painful -- many people will be put out of business and some will leave LL. But ultimately, LL knows that the people who put in the most user hours will adjust. They always do. New people won't know or care. There's always another guy to buy the island, as Kenny Linden once explained to Random Unsung...

Concierge Customers Take Angry Protest to Nautilus Waterfront

UPDATE: Protestors are urging residents who are outraged at the price hikes and unfair process to vote MISC-1776 on the JIRA. As of 6 pm SLT the proposal had already garnered 1457 votes.

I'm reporting live from the waterfront in the new Nautilus continent where the new-paint smell from the Lindens' themed build is still in the air and packing boxes are everywhere. Yet the very land barons who just spent anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 per 1024 m2 off the auction here are protesting madly, waving red and black banners with red, bloody hands with a stigmata-like hole in the middle -- a kind of grim parody of the famous hand-eye logo of Linden Lab. They are mad as hell at new price hikes on openspace sims, have formed a protest group Save Our Openspace Sims, and have turned out 100 avatars on 3 new sims to demonstrate.

Concierge customers are rioting, we're told, having "set the Linden offices on fire," which of course they can't really do in a virtual world, and even with fire prims on Linden land with auto return, but which they're doing with self-immolation.

Concierge List is crackling with protest and swearing and hate. Sarah Nerd, popular land owner, newbie helper and wacky content maker, was banned off the Concierge List last night for saying "Fuck You Linden Lab!" at the news that she and her fellow land barons are taking yet another hit. She was among many land dealers whose inventory was devalued some 40-60 percent over night earlier this year with the "savings pass-along" and island price crash, who is now facing a 67 percent price *hike* on the open space sims she converted to because her full-prim sims sat empty after the Lindens price hike. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Many on the list and on the waterfront are talking about "bait and switch still," noting that by upping prim counts, making parcels divisible, enabling placement anywhere on the grid, the Lindens were nodding and winking about these openspace sims for uses other than those claimed on the website, where careful caveats alert customers who read the fine print that the sims can't be used except for water or forest, and tickets on performance issuances will not be accepted.

Everbody has a story. Typically, someone will tell you about "my girlfriend and I and our boat and home and our careful use of this sim, which was only used very lightly" lol. But the presence of the home, the boat, the sex-bed, etc. all bely that "light" use. "I only had 4 tenants on my OS, it was only light use," somebody is swearing to me.

I'm standing among the usual under-dressed and over-dressed SL crowd, and the Babblers are on full tilt, as French and Portugese residents have joined English speakers from the US, UK, Netherlands and elsewhere.

I guess I'm finding it rather, er, ironic that the black-and-red flags are waving on Kalyrra Heart's heavily-priced land here, with the slogans "You ruined my home, you ruined my SL," which is exactly what she did to others for years on end with her extortionist ad farm parcels and blighty signs. Karma much?

I've got the transcript of an impromptu Concierge chat with Jack Linden, who emerged earlier this afternoon, but it doesn't say much, will post in a bit.

Jack Bombs the Humper Bunkers

I've never seen the Concierge List so hopping mad, more pissed than the GOMing of the GOM, more angry than the withdrawal of telehubs, more incensed than the expose of the insider island price, more aggro'd than the sudden Bolshevik price drop devaluing sims by 60 percent (now the price is going up more than 60 percent). Furious! (Indeed, those who don't remember those historical lows of SL I've just linked here are doomed to repeat them...)

Jack has thrown a bomb with his announcement tonight that openspace sims' tier will jump from $75 to $125 after January 1, the initial purchase price will go from $250 to $375, and educational discounts will be removed. Worst of all, from the perspective of the land baron sector, the abililty to designate other owner/tierpayers to the Lindens, to completely turn over these products to secondary buyers, will be removed (you have to have a private island to be able to purchase them, and island owners were thus able to make a killing flipping the islands over to renters with full estate permissions).

There is outraged talk of "bait and switch" and lawsuits and attorneys -- but I'm afraid the Lindens have covered themselves pretty well on this one:

Magellan's Moth and Dolphin Continents Linked

I found a lantern in Nautilus with the same moths flitting around it as used to be in the Moth Continent at the Temple of Iris.

The lanterns are strewn around the new continent of Nautilus, which seems to have been a civilization of dolphins, except I have no idea how those dolphins were able to drag big blocks of stone up out of the rivers, build canals, and fashion gold statues. But maybe they pressed some other lesser race into serve as slaves (moles?).

You may recall the Evil Lindens removed the lanterns and moths that came out every night at 7:48 pm SLT in the Atoll Continent (Hetero-etcera) and flew around the light. While the Iris temple Linden land still says "as a moth drawn to the flame..." the moths were all removed -- God knows why. Evil Lindens probably thought they were laggy or somebody complained about them. I used to have them at Waved, a few sims away from the Iris temple.

Through the sacred rites of Sacraria, the group I formed to preserve the Ways of the Moth Temple, which Xenon Linden even joined back in the day, I was able to get one lantern that I put up in the build Jessica Ornitz did in Iris to make the infohub. Sadly, the moths didn't come out at 7:48 pm. But one day clicking on edit, I saw that inside the object was another prim titled "Moths". I took it out, and the moths flew immediately around the lantern -- but permanently, not just once a day. You can go see it there in Iris. If I tried to put the moths in any other lantern that wasn't that special one, they simply disappeared.

So somehow, they were brought to the new continent.

Here I am on Nautilus, flying around, looking at Thugs' Life, and the usual Banality of Sims. The land is flipping faster than burgers at McDonalds. Literally land melts before my eyes, appears from TraderJohn Sousa for $57,600 -- and before I can even click on it, whoops, it's flipped magically, with no avatars in site (I think they're up in the air on helicopters? Or?) and it is now another group's.

Yes, Evil has entered our world within 48 hours of the auction sells. Kalyrra Heart and Tanaka Goodfornothing or whatever her name is, partners in crime, were flying around jeering at me. "Can't cut these up, girls," sez I -- whereupon Tanaka says, "We're so wealthy now we can buy the 1024s." With Jack's new rules, she was forced to put a more modest and not spinning sign, and the price was a healthy $79,000. I saw than Elanthius did win a few today, after his failure to snag any yesterday.

Now that I'm part of Thugs' Life myself, having bought a Nautilus parcel, I had an Evil Plan. When I saw how primmy and retarded these Lindens buildings were (headbanger ceilings, too much decoration -- a 244 house for a 468 prim plot, no privacy windows) I thought I'll defat them, and put on their privacy windows, and then sell them for $5. Except...you can't transfer or copy them, you can only buy copies off the market places. Clever!

If Linden Lab Ran the United States...

Naturally socialists Nobody Fugazi and Vint Falken see nothing but evil in the idea of Linden Lab running the United States of America or The World.

I wish I could find the article now by the guy who compared the U.S. Constitution to the TOS of Second Life and found it terribly wanting, of course. Anybody? I can't seem to find the link -- but it was sobering.

Obviously, on the down side, the removal from the service for "any reason or no reason" and the ability to confiscate all your property means that the state could kill you and seize all your property arbitrarily -- as the anonymous poster comments on Nobody's blog -- and of course, no reasonable state does this, and only the most totalitarian states routinely engage in this, and not forever, as people rebel.

But let's push it further...

1. When the state kills you and seizes your property, you can come back on an alt and use an anonymizer. In fact, it's wise for citizens to keep a number of "mule" alts with property and money at the ready for just this occasion when the state exercises its arbitrary and oppressive rule : )

2. There are no taxes, only rent -- or you can live free, camp, squat, fly around. Rent is fairly low, given that you get shelter, a place to have sex, a place to work and socialize all for about $25 or $50.

3. You can talk to 1,000 people at once in a group, and not have to ever pay a telephone bill.

4. The president, vice president, and many secretaries and deputy secretaries of state have office hours once a week, and you can always IM them.

5. You can pretty well instantly liquidate all your property to land bots or yard sales, and many rentals are refundable in case you run out of cash.

6. You never die, and you can set it up so that when you do die in real life, your spouse or children get your avatar and all his property, and your store can remain open and your creations can keep selling indefinitely. The state collects no death tax and does not insist on any burial procedures.

7. There would never be any elections, which has its down side, but you'd also be spared the expense and tedium of watching two candidates insult each other and tell lies for years. If you didn't like the government on your sim, make a new group with yourself as owner and move to a new sim.

8. You can easily be banned from the state blog and forums (media) but you can start a third-party blog that they can't touch, and also hold innumerable live debates inworld pretty much without interference.

9. The state builds roads and parks for free, without taxation. To be sure, this means you have to put up with juice bars and bowling alleys called "Hot Balls", but you can always fly to another sim.

10. The state lets you keep a limitless amount of inventory without charge, and you can store it without having to take up space inworld.

Thugs' Life

Land baron Scott Maroon, winner of 10 auctions in Nautilus.

This isn't a post about the shopping mall called Thugs' Life where I've been camping and being bitten by zombies. No, it's about the Second Life Land Auctions, which have no transparency, permission for dubious practices, and therefore create an atmosphere of thuggishness around the land market. This really needs to stop, although calls for auction transparency go unheeded by the Lindens. When I've questioned Jack Linden specifically about this problem of the failure to show who bid or even who won any more, he told me last year that it was a coding problem that had to do with using ebay software that doesn't show that. But the Lindens' own program used to show this and it was not only a useful deterrent to packing numerous bidds in everywhere to jack up prices, it was a necessary measure of accountability in a very secretive process.

Recently I decided to bid on the land in the new Dolphins build that the Lindens have lavished such mole attention on in the continent of Nautilus. I figured that much like Bay City, I would have to bid very high, at least $50,000 for these double-prim 1024 lots which cannot be subdivided or joined. The Lindens have also made even more landscaping and protected waterfront land in this build by contrast with Bay City, which was more urban.

At first, I was encouraged by seeing that a lot of the parcels seemed to be bid only to 15,000 or 20,000 with only a day left. So I bid on first one, then another, only to find that as soon as I did that, repeatedly, it went up to $50,000 or even $60,000 and showed no sign of stopping. I then tried about 6 more, trying to bid on them, and first seeing them seeming to stop at 30,000 or 40,000, and then, with only an hour left, going up much more. At once point, I had bids on about 6 or 7 of them, but I realized they could be bid up very high. I saw land barons flying around like vultures inworld, and various obvious alts.

I decided to visit Yamm, the site of some particularly nice lots overlooking waterfront and a purple quartz crystal mounted in a little atrium, to see what was up. I spotted Scott Maroon, a land baron with a sales and rental business who is also maker of the Ultimate Tip Jar. He's a member of Honourable Land Dealers, a group that promises to give people back any botted land if it was set too low by mistake. I never did understand if they had any other ethical practices they support.

It occurred to me that there was absolutely nothing or nobody to stop a land baron from going on every single one of hundreds of auctions for the day and bidding them way up to a fantastic price, $50,000 or above, precisely to make it appear to anyone that attempts to bid on them that they are very high bids. That will discourage casual bidders, or people just looking to bid on one particular parcel they like. It means that if they face discouragement one or two times on one bid, or on several parcels, they'll give up.

That leaves the way clear for many of the bids to sit at lower prices, that in fact will go for those lower prices, enabling determined land barons to pick up the auctions that they've put on very high bids for a much lower price than their bid, discourage competition, and then pay premium on only a few that go way up -- winning with visibly higher prices and discouraging others. It raised the question to me as to whether this method was being used, and whether it makes sense to push for a limit on bids on the auction.

Flying around, I came upon the same land baron over and over again on the parcels I bid on, so I decided just to ask him what he was up to:

Camping to Death

You know, it's gotten damn hard to camp.

Here I am reporting live to you from PRO Textures, on an island called Rock, a store that sells "Hair Wallpaper Homes Windows Brick Wood" (what a combo!) and which has a nice little Italianate cafe offering camping, which is cleverly disguised as anims that say "socialize". A group of about 10 of us, half of us reduced to blurry white balls (they Caspered) are sitting like zombies, not uttering a word, but periodically, the chat is punctuated with a notice: PROKOFY NEVA HAS EARNED $20 FOR SOCIALIZING! I think it bumps us off after a certain point, because that's how I got a seat.

And boy, was it hard. Yesterday I started very early in the morning simply trying to find a place -- I wanted to see how the sector was doing. I went to a number of places where the camping was broken and disabled.

Then, I kept TPing to the top traffic stores, but all the camp spots were taken. They were also very cleverly hidden. Nowadays, say, a furniture store, will strew their camp stations all around the entire island, and they come in the form not of benches with CAMP texts floating over them, but flower beds, wheelbarrows, painting ladders, street food vendor carts, etc. At first, seeing these busy, happy people doing various activities like planting, you feel as if you are in the Sims again, until you see that they are AFK, and earning money. I went to so many places, and stared around trying to find so many "work stations", that when I finally got on the bus for work later in the morning in RL, and saw a man digging in the earth, kneeling by a wheelbarrow, I fully expected to see the text "$2/15 minutes" floating over his head, and had to resist the urge to right-click on him.