Un-BEAR-able

Somebody named Baloo IM'd me inworld the other day with the "hot tip" that Lias Leandros, owner of the Voodoo Lounge and veteran fighter against loiterers in the infohub of Bear, had had her "club school" "evicted" from the sim. This made no sense, since she wasn't screaming on any blogs or in Concierge or anything, so I went out to the sim to see what was up.

Before I got a new computer, I have to say that I was never able to, uh, plumb the depths of Bear. With a draw distance of barely 64, and the inability to cam around with crashing, my past trips to Bear consisted of landing in that campy build that looks like Camp Iwanalayu or something, and noticing a gaggle of griefing types who never really rise above the radar to be AR'd. The build seemed rustic and good enough -- and the sim was never completely full.

Now, with the ability to move, fly around, and zoom out 512 m2, I see the issue. LOL.

First, as reported, Torley's "wife" (he calls her wife, but apparently they are not legally married), resident Ravenelle Zugzwang, who was one of the developers of this infohub, has built a big-ass megaprim...scrim (as we used to call them in the very early days of SL, when people would make various walls, clear on one side and textured on the other, to block out the views of ugly builds). The scrim is meant to make you feel as if you are plunged into the woods like in Little Red Riding Hood or something, but like all such walls in SL with RL-like pictures, it looks like...a giant obstructure board on it that sticks out like a sore thumb. Only a newbie with a paralyzed draw of 64 unable to move, or me with a crappy computer, would think they were in an, uh, immersive environment.

How is that Torley live-in lover got to block the views around an infohub?

 

Well, it was all legal, I guess. I mean, the resident infohub development programs, which I took part in back in 2005, was indeen an open competition. Jesse Linden advertised it on the forums. Torley pushed it. The Lindens kept trying to get people to submit designs and get them built. But they never got more than 14, and even those people had to be flogged to get them going. The story of all content building and contests in SL, which is why we get Moles and Nautilus.

I don't think Torley and Ravenelle were an "item" back then, but the scrim came during the period when they did already begin living together.

What does the scrim block? Well, now, it blocks a giant half-sim long neon sign saying THE BITCH IS GONE! on a parcel owned by none other than Ryan Radio. Yeesh. He of the ad farm extortion infamy, one of the nastiest little buggers out there.

I saw a bunch of Woodbury-type ugly-avatared creatures hanging out, and boasting with titles that they were "loitering". See, that was the essence of Lias' beef, expressed in mind-numbing lengthy and repetitive argumentation on the forums that made me look like a 150-word squib man for Harper's magazine.

I couldn't take up Lias cause, because it was literalist and went against the basic principle of freedom of assembly. She insisted that the Lindens had identified infohubs as only for studying and getting information and orienting, and welcome areas as hangouts. If Bear was an infohub and not a welcome area, then by that logic, loiterers should have been removed.

Well, that part I agree with. I felt even back in 2004 that the Lindens should have taken charge on these welcome areas and telehubs and infohubs and such and laid down the law. Using the "disturbance of the peace" clause, they should have vigorously expelled all the people swearing, using stupid sound clips, making giant obtrusive avatars that bumped people, etc. There develop in these hubs little cliques of losers that grief very obviously, i.e. with caging newbies, or who "stay under the radar" but who are obnoxious enough that Lindens can act. Like that idiot at Waterhead who had a scripted item called "Tourette's Syndrome". Sigh.

But the Lindens, being licentious libertarian hippies, let it be. Only for actual literal violation of a TOS thing like "shooting" would they remove someone. So naturally, in that climate of impunity, you could constantly rez on there and see idiots with giant penises banging people, particle-blasting ninnies, sound-click annoyers, freaks in Nazi uniforms, naked goths etc. etc. The whole SL freak show on parade, which unfortunately, would be exactly what somebody like a Time magazine journalist would see upon landing randomly in SL. The Lindens just would never set aside their licentiousness to say, hey, this is not putting our best face forward. We have loads of free land where people can go hang out if they want to. No need to have them grief newbies like this.

But instead of acting firmly, the Lindens ran from the problem. They created the system of closed orientation sims (actually GOMing the FIC idea of Cabinhead, which was a plan for a sim to which only FIC mentors could come to greet and educate newbies, and which would be closed to everyone else to prevent "loitering" and "griefing").

As often happens in SL, by fighting the loiterers, Lias made them worse. And they began to harass her. Of course, her club is also a lag-bomb and plug-ugly. I mean, look at those huge obscene legs, that you have to walk through to get into her store...yuck. Like a carnival freak show. I suppose Ravenelle wanted to cover up the view of THAT too. And as you look around the sim, you see all kinds of adds and ugly junk. It's amazingly bad. How do people let SL get like that? By having a notion that this is freedom -- endless fuck-you hedonism.

So far from feeling as if she was "evicted," Lias told me a long shaggy dog story about how she was actually glad to be rid of that parcel and its tier and make Ryan pay for it...or was it the other way around?  Far from being evicted from the sim, there she is. Her "club school," which I guess was sort of about teaching people to be pole dancers, was moved to some place less laggy. Perhaps she had wanted to recruit newbies and resented the sim being filled up with the loiterers.

Now, she says, the loiterers, without her to kick around, have to step up and try to make something positive instead of sniping. Supposedly they had plans for doing this or that, but fought among themselves.

Well, there's lots more...but it's incoherent. Who said what when. The takeaway is that the Lindens might be persuaded, in part by loiterers who used to abuse the infohubs, and now trash them on the forums, to pull them. Geez, I hope  not, we worked goddamn hard to make the one in Ross, and the land preserve next t othe one in Iris. Over course, with the Lindens, one has to be prepared for anything.

Meanwhile, I read that the Hobos of Calletta went to the Rezzable sims. That is, the Calletta build and infohub still remains, but the Hobos were persuaded to set up came in Rezzable. And there, I can't help feeling that there's a terrible shill here, and that the Hobos were grabbed like Native Americans and put on a reservation. They pride themselves on being independent and free, but here they walked right into this big corporate fandago of RightasRain's, which I see based on a really cynical premise -- that push media should still rain, that the land model and contiguous model for SL is non-viable, and that only professional builds should be made, to attract hordes of users, who then pay a pass fee, and then gawk at ads which they then click on. I find it an outdated and impoverished model, and I feel bad that the Hobos are drawn into to be mere "rich content" that the eyeballs are supposed to glue on to, prior to being set up to look at the ads.

Comments

[AlterEgoTrip Svenska]

Typically, this is not "reporting" as much as it focuses on the relationship between Torley and Ravenell..

How is this type of your TYPICAL demoralizating of character "free journalism".. yesterday I mention Torley and today here you are bashing them..

Is it a reaction to what I said?

[Yumi Murakami]

Are you really supporting the InfoHub building offer?

Wasn't that the time when InfoFunnel was written and the Lindens were asking people to design, not entire InfoHubs, but "newspaper racks", presumably to hold the MM?

[Prokofy Neva]

Of course I support it and have for more than 2 years now, Yumi, where have you been? I bid on one of them with a project that was built in 2006. And I'm working on another one by the Iris infohub. I think it's a great thing.

You're confusing the fact that originally, BEFORE this plan to have resident development, the Lindens made these lame hippo hubs -- that had 0 or 20 traffic. No one went to them. Nothing happened on them. They stuck that InfoNet kiosk on it, but I objected to that because it privileged one resident's system networked through all of them, and on that system were bad reviews denouncing some businesses and promoting others. It was not appropriate. I imagine it either broke or some Linden finally figured out it was not the right thing, and removed it.

Yes, I called it InfoFunnel as it was not an open system.'

Newspaper racks never took off that I ever saw. They advertised to contribute to them but I haven't seen them.