The Cracked Porcelain Doll

Crap Mariner continues to manifest some kind of psychic disturbances, showing his avatar skin as human, with increasing patches of broken porcelain, like a doll.

Whatever is troubling him in RL or SL, I'm serving as a punching bag for this. It's strange. I don't know what it's really about.

A few weeks ago, I wrote on Twitter:

Lately Crap Mariner has been appearing as a human being or porcelain doll & not a robot. I'm finding this too Uncanny Valley. Make it stop! 1:44 AM Jun 14th via web

A humorous, light comment of the sort that someone who operates SecondLie Scribe and SecondLie some of the time  often makes  (apparently one of the people he shared this account with was the griefing asshole from Woodbury named Cam). A joke that hinges on the idea of a kind of man-bite-dog -- that ordinarily, you might find it Twilight Zone if a human became more robotic; but because Crap starts out as a robot, if he becomes more human, you find *that* Uncanny Valley.

For some reason, this comment struck home to this being/avatar Crap Mariner, and he began to savage me. He began to write the most awful untrue things about me. Like that I only cared about traffic to pay ads. Or that I was a greedy landlord and self interested only. Or that I wanted to become CEO of Linden Lab and was holding out for a better contract. Etc. Etc. Creepy! What makes people write lies like that? To impugn awful things to someone they know aren't true? That they've never said for years?

So, brushing past those obvious trolling bullshit techniques, I try to think, what is this *really* about. Perhaps my critique of Grace, that came before that. But yet, Crap seemed to remain calm about my remarks, possibly because deep down, he is pretty done with a lot of those musicians whom he tried to promote and help and never seemed to appreciate or cooperate with his leadership. He is likely indifferent to whatever scrapping is occuring between the Not Possible in Real Life marms and the musicians and whomeover over their 70 -- oops, now 4 -- sims.

Perhaps he got mad at my indifference to the Linden "bloodbath". I'm indifferent -- not maliciously gleeful as is wrongfully impugned to me -- because I think it's good that for once, the Lab took the hit and not the residents. But Crap, who was making these really nasty, vicious parodies of M Linden all this time, and was gunning for him to be fired next, saw it differently. He treats the Linden culling as some kind of noble losses in a civil war on his own side or something.

I don't have any use for M Linden, but I don't feel the animosity toward him as a "suit" or something that Crap as a geek and grid monkey feels. I appreciate whatever professionalism and efforts he brought to the table; I didn't appreciate his ruinious Viewer 2, which, bTW, Crap only praised as a toy to play with for all his Windlighty photos.

I once told Crap that I thought making a parody of M was a really great idea, and making him as an alphabet letter -- the really unpopular thing these new management types did in making them selves grandly named by letters -- was brilliant. But then, what didn't fit was his strange, retarded southern-style voice, like he was a hick. Whatever you want to say about M, I told Crap at the time, he's not a hick. He's a San Franciscan. This is a gentleman in the best clothes with the best that modern urban culture can give him. I would have parodied him as something like the hippie teacher on Hey Arnold, ineffectual, mild, bland, etc. Or as somewhat light in the loafers.

But Crap had a deep animosity to this *class* of human being -- manager of geeks -- as being a hick, stupid. Of course, there's something annoying -- even sinister -- about Crap's own class -- the geeks, the coders, the grid monkeys, the helpdeskers, etc. They have no loyalty to companies. They view themselves as highly superior to customers and management and other kinds of employees. They are in a permanent LOLZ and a sneer and view themselves as highly transient guns for hire that anyone is glad to hire and gets down on their knees and begs to work for $50-75 an hour.

I'm glad there a lot more of these people unemployed these days than there used to be, and I hope they will come to learn the joys of working at the post office, Rite-Aid, Kelly Girl, the 7/11, and the strawberry fields as I have over the years.

Now Crap is shrieking about this content loss of this fellow named Graf, and implying, by wearing a hated parody shirt of me called "Prok Star" made by the vicious little mediocrity Shaun Altman and distributed by the Woodburies, that I've done something evil. I've criticized Graf for being a prima dona and not waiting longer to let his case be processed and instead deleting sims and showing drama and charging out of SL in a huff.

I've been one of Crap's biggest fans, reading his posts and admiring his pictures and stories every day. I never became a groupie of the 100-word story events or other events on his sim -- I found that contrived and really not truly literary, but geeky -- not for us. But SL is such that an artist like Crap can have concentric circles of fans -- some people like one thing, other people like another, and the media is adjusted to have full immersion or lite sampling.

Lately, what Crap has been using his daily story hour posts for is to tell us the story of a RL diet and weight loss, coupled, punishingly, with a war on the wallet. I admire people who set goals and achieve them and Crap is doing that, losing weight, saving money towards other goals, eating healthy.

Yet...there's something back of this that points to a psychic disturbance. People have all kinds of reasons for losing weight and eating healthy -- it's hard to do and usually they finally take it on when either they have terrible health news delivered to them by doctors, or they need to find sexual/romantic partners, or they are just in midlife crisis -- something isn't right.

Of course, despite the always-on, always-share, Exposed Me quality of social media, we're not supposed to ask what is behind what already seems like a deep exposure. We don't Need to Know whether someone is 20 pounds less or ate burritos or clumps of spinach for lunch, but we're told this Too Much Information and then...we're supposed to shut up.

This is what I mean by social media as being such a burning lie -- such a subterfuge even as it discloses and exposes.

In real life, your very close friends who would tell just you -- and not the entire world -- that they were losing weight because their doctor warned them of a heart attack or because they needed a new girlfriend. That is, their valiant acts would come bundled with other relavant just-for-you news.

In social media fake life. somebody broadcasts their diets all day and their health eating and you feel like you're getting bulletins from Susan Powter and Richard, the sweating to the oldies guy, but you aren't hearing what's *really* up. And you don't dare comment or ask, except in a superficial way, because then you're rude, etc.

Social media like Second Life (which I clump together with this phenomenon, although they're different) also creates such fake and false friends. You think someone you've talked to nearly every day pleasantly, with understanding, with solidarity, with shared insights, with cameraderie is your "friend," but they aren't really. Of course you don't know them and can't see their *real* setting.

And they can turn on your suddenly like a junkyard dog and be harbouring terrible grievances for miles.

To which I can only shrug. Crap needs a punching bag and is using me. Something is wrong -- it's not about me. Even if somehow he has transformed it into being about me -- I don't care. I long since ceased expecting SL to be a place for real friends. When I want real friends, I spend time with my RL friends I can actually see and share a cup of tea with. I look at SL as primarily a useful interface for mediating enemies such that you can pry this or that feature of them and their works worth following from the other negative or disliked features of them.

What's happening with Crap reminds me of Maxx Monde. An arrogant FIC oldbie whom at first I appreciated as a newbie in the way you do when you haven't seen yet that a person is an asshole. Appreciated, even sympathized with, even exchanged RL info with. Then, you say something "off," they don't like, whoops, you're not a friend, and then whoops, you're savaged on the forums out of spleen. Max was breaking up his marriage, losing weight to find new partners, being an arrogant asshole, then moving on from his business of building in SL to whatever, only to surface back on the loathsome Second Citizen now and then. How filled Second Life is with such personages! Vain, stupid, arrogant -- making interesting and even beautiful things, but turning out to be assholes. Why?

Which is pretty much my attitude on the recent blowback from Prokofy, Soror, SaveMe, Finn, Indigo, Winona, Herald anklebiters, et al.

Who are these other people? I never heard of any of them. Oh, I think I saw one of them on Twitter but I don't know them. So, other people are giving blowback to Crap these days? Hm, maybe *I'm* not the problem!

What makes someone like Crap so publicly unadjusted and unhappy with their world and lashing out at friends over some minor disagreement?

Comments

[Skylar Smythe]

:( You have sent literally hundreds of male SL avatars into therapy for ptsd at the suggestion that I am a man...

;) Clearly not... although I have been accused of having brass balls but I've always taken that to be a compliment not a physiological gender questionable accusation.

/me checks her drawers...

Nope. Lady bits. And a big heart :)

xoxox
Skylar

[Prokofy Neva]

Skylar, you are like so many empty-headed, not-very-intelligent conscience-free people who tune in to stories selectively, and self-interestedly in Second Life in this sort of mindless gawking way, imagining that you are voicing "reason" or "conscience" when you are only exhibiting "stupidity".

I haven't made any "personal attacks" on Crap Mariner. *He's made personal attacks on me that I've recording, documenting, and pushing back on.* I can see for the reading-and-comprehending challenged I'm going to have to go round all those up, cite them, and perhaps a dumb-ass like you can then *grasp* the dimensions of this, and then your morality can be challenged -- since merely explaining it in a blog in summary process isn't persuading you -- because you start out biased, as a little obnoxious twerp that has to show up on just about every entry to savage me, "just because" any sort of needful criticism bothers you -- because you either represent some faction in SL, or you just don't like controversy.

Your conscience doesn't extend to be able to grasp that the half dozen nasty things that Crap wrote about me in no way are merited by, deserved, or equal to the one thing I wrote on twitter or anything else I've explained since about him. And when people start attacking me in outrageous ways like that, I publicize what they are doing -- number one -- in the hopes that a record is created and some shaming factor is built in. And I go on resisting. I haven't attacked Crap or said anything "outrageous" or "untrue" about him. I've said he is going through some psychic disturbance; that he is thin-skinned despite being a tell-all blogger. These are true statements.

What's *your* problem that you need to keep distorting the true record like that, and accuse me of "griefing" when all I've done is *publicize someone's bad behaviour* and *pushed back on it*.

Where were you, with your fine outrageous indignation, when Crap wrote that I wanted to be CEO of Linden Lab but was holding out for the right contract? We missed you in the ranks of the conscience-troubled then.

Extropia is truly a loon, with no sense of humour. Duh, we get what the Uncanny Valley is -- when a human is so realistic it doesn't look natural. And so it was the opposite with Crap changing from a more obvious robotic robot skin to a more human skin (although even his robot had humanoid features). And so his more realistic human was Uncanny Valley in reverse, *precisely* because it look more realistic in the human direction, and not unrealistic and weird in the robot-but-human direction. Extropia is such a literalist that he's unable to conceptualize these things.

As for this other loon who has showed up here to gawk at this latest SL traffic accident. Huh? I'm not getting this. Who is Huw Grau? No one I ever heard of. An anonymous fucktard indeed. Someone who doesn't link their avatar account with their RL name -- the way mine is.

I'm not seeing why I need to debate such an asshole. For what? About what?

Copper Robot? I don't get this. Somehow this Huw Grau doesn't like what I said about Mitch Wagner? But I stand *absolutely* behind why I said about Mitch Wagner: thoughtful, but thin-skinned. I can't *imagine* that Mitch Wagner would want to turn over his Copper Robot show, which seems to be mainly on drama-free science topics and such, to some debate about some blogger in SL. Not getting this.

Mitch posted a complaint on his Facebook about people "harassing" him on his web page column about some gadget. I expected to see some awful trolling and obscenities. I go look -- and I see that it's just normal criticism. Of the kind we all face. Not a 10th of what I get on my blog. So I said, "You're whining, Mitch" on his facebook and he started a FBihad, blocking, eliminating, denouncing, and accusing me of being "rude" in his "home" (!) which is how he views the public web page of a journalist who writes on public Internet pages. I view that sort of things as utter bullshit.

I see Mitch now hounding Hiro Pendragon because Hiro said some dumb-ass geeky complaint about the iphone not working. Hiro is an ass. but so what? Mitch hounds him for like 20 tweets. This is always about male geek egos. I don't see why I need to feed it.

I certainly fail to see why I need to go talk to some idiot on voice. Why? I debate people in RL and SL all the time, in real voice and text, and it is not about "being afraid". It's about refusing to be baited by anonymous fucktards for no reason who can't even explain coherently what their debate topic is except something like "you're hiding behind your blog."

?! What an loser.

[Prokofy Neva]

>>:( You have sent literally hundreds of male SL avatars into therapy for ptsd at the suggestion that I am a man..

Many avatars in SL who are female with made-up whore names like "Sky" etc are males. So it stands to reason to ask someone who persists in pestering me on my blog if they are a mangina. Why? Because I find the only people who persist in pestering me relentlessly tend to be manginas.

Some sort of strange tic on their part. If you're a RL female, great! Who cares? But your reasons for pestering me here don't add up.

[Skylar Smythe]

I think you have a Joan of Arc complex. Everything is grossly exaggerated into some kind of psycho-social turrets where you are being "savaged".

I don't see it that way.

There are different types of whores. I don't fall into any of the subcategories including "attention whore" willing to be malicious on a blog to get attention, page rank or up my page views.

I've defended you in the past actually... my point is that banter is great. Debate is awesome. Personal soapbox bullshit negativity for the sake of notoriety is boring and overrated. Particularly for an intelligent person with a good deal more valid information / opinion to share.

I said it was beneath you... you called me a whore. :) Do I need to demonstrate further?

I'm not pestering you. I have the right to make a point just as you do Prokofy. I'm actually doing it in a very congenial way :) I mean no harm or insult to anyone.

I simply think your blog would be better if you stuck to real issues rather than boneheaded venom.

C'mere... pucker up. I wanna smooch you... you big tough mean blogger you... that doesn't make me a whore mind you...

At least I don't think so. You can ponder it though. Perhaps on a day you are feeling playful.

*scratches head thoughtfully*

xoxoxo
Skylar

[Extropia DaSilva]

I just do not like the way people misuse terms to the point where the original definition becomes lost.

Oh, and as I am, strictly speaking, of no gender at all (despite the fact that I appear female inworld), you should use the gender neutral term 've' if you really cannot bring yourself to call me 'she' like you always used to:)

As for having no sense of humour, well, I do not share YOUR sense of humour but it is not the only kind in existence, is it?

[Extropia DaSilva]

Why does this site automatically and arbitrarily edit posts? I am not saying you do it, Prok. I know you do not, because even in preview I find most of what I typed has been deleted (and no, I do not post huge replies). It is a pain, having to post multiple little replies, just because all but one or two paragraphs from an original post are lost. It is not even as if there is a limited wordcount I must stick to. Sometimes I get away with a novella of a reply, other times I am fortunate if more than one paragraph will be permitted:(

[Helen]

"What makes people write lies like that? To impugn awful things to someone they know aren't true? That they've never said..."

Terrible isn't it. It's a shame there aren't more libel actions brought against people publishing lies online. Then people would get what they deserved - especially when the lies are provable.

[Prokofy Neva]

Helen, you have to use a first and last recognizable valid SL or RL name to post here, otherwise you are blocked. If you feel there is any material that is libelous, call your lawyer.

Um, this site doesn't edit posts, and I don't edit posts. Nobody has this problem except the loon Extropia. Extropia is a loon. The only mystery is why Gwyn keeps feeding this loony alter ego.

Skylar's fake name is *like* a whore. I have no idea if she is a whore inworld, who cares. I can see the limited ability to comprehend the most basic facts I'm dealing with. Again, the inability to be evenhanded is a chronic problem for people like Sklyar and their refined sense of justice and righteous indignation. There aren't any posts on Crap's website when time and gain, he posts outrageous tripe about me, which is just so uncharacteristic, he hasn't done that before, but whatever, obviously he's having some life crisis and I'm a convenient punching bag as he attempts to establish his complex online/offline identities and find his social niche with likeminded friends he can bond with by opposing Prokofy. Khamon also found the need for that sort of tribal bonding.

[Extropia DaSilva]

The reply I posted (the one that begins 'I do not like the way people misuse terms') originally had several paragraphs including one that explained further why I thought the term was misused, and others that picked up on other aspects of Prok's replies. When I previewed the post, everything proceeding 'I do not like..' was gone. This is not the first time this has happened. In fact, it happens so often I am pleasently surprised when this site lets me have my say in one reply, rather than forcing me to divide my reply up into several posts. And no, they are not huge long replies, in fact mostly they are shorter than those of other contributors. Prok can call me a lunatic all he likes, but this random, automatic deletion genuinely happens.

[Cocoanut Koala]

Strange. I don't think you will be able to figure it out, Prok.

[Rock Ramona]

yanno what amazes me...all you folks who claim to hate prok soooo bad you can hardly stand it...why do you continue to read and post here??????you dont despise prok,you feed on her,you bitch and complain about how sick she is????none of you are any better,stop reading her blog and stop commenting...ill be watching to see who stops commenting :P

[Skylar Smythe]

No. I insist on the last word...

:oP

Skylar

[Arkal Disc Filter]

I was at a conference recently where one of the speakers was discussing the negative psychological effects of social media, and she mentioned the development of shallow relationships. People think they have a relationship when they know someone's status update on Facebook - and this attitude about relationships leads to the phenomena you described here.

[Prokofy Neva]

Huw Grau is Rory Serpente.