Second Thoughts

But really an adorable puppy

But really an adorable puppy The "puppy" is really that special touch lol. Visit Champlain (128, 124, 22)

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We Shall Conquer SL

We Shall Conquer SL Check this out! Visit Champlain (128, 124, 22)

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Yikes

Yikes Check this out! Visit Champlain (128, 124, 22)

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Full moon brings them out

Full moon brings them out Check this out! Visit Champlain (127, 125, 22)

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Furry Neko Katana thing

Furry Neko Katana thing Check this out! Visit Champlain (128, 127, 22)

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The Battle of Second Life

The Battle of Second Life Furry reporting for duty. Visit Champlain (128, 127, 22)

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Obscure Vineyard Abandoned

Obscure Vineyard Abandoned Abandoned by a guy who held it for only a month Visit Obscure (205, 86, 60)

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Obscure Sandbox Up for Sale

Obscure Sandbox Up for Sale Obscure sandbox going on the block. $80,000 for about 8000 m2 Visit Obscure (148, 218, 44)

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Tateru Nino is Really Awful Lately

Tateru Nino has really gotten dreadful lately -- and it needs to be called out. It's all about a struggle for power of a certain faction in SL, and it's important always to expose those grabs for what they are.

I've always found Tateru creepy. Ever since I found her grasping and grabbing for power and influence as Number One Newbie Helper front and center in the orientation island, queening it over everyone at NCI, and constantly blogging and commenting from the hard-left perspective, boosting the open-source cult, I've just found her offensive. I've always resisted Tateru, never found her a heroine, never saw her charming or witty -- and like I say, have largely been *creeped*. This may be a function of her Aspberger's, but not all such persons are creepy -- she combines the Australian extreme leftism and opensourcery in a particularly toxic brew, and has always just had way too much influence -- boosted by the Lindens she assiduously sucks up to.

When she had the very high-traffic Massively.com perch, she was a bit more moderate in tone, although still negative on SL, negative on business in SL, and promoting the opensource and Aussie leftie shtick wherever possible. Now that she's left there (as she always insists "for her own reasons"), she's become far more extreme and "out there".

In recent months, she's filed a string of mendacious and tenaciously tendentious pieces that seek to portray Linden Lab and SL as failing, and in dire need of following the leftwing opensource "solution". They are startling, really, for the big whoppers they tell.

o A piece claiming that LL was "falling down on the job" of copyright protection, although they have only increased all their efforts and devised policies in recent years which they do enforce -- and worst of all, using as the example of this false claim and highly dubious character in SL -- Aeonix Aeon of Andromeda Media -- who was running what amounts to a scam, forcing big companies to protect their IP by coming to SL and licensing replica producers in the virtual world -- awful stuff, which I thoroughly denounced, and from a thorough scoundrel. Tateru falsely claims he was "bitten" -- in fact, he was the biter, and so is she.

Such a mess-up really should have led to Tateru apologizing and saying, "Well, I didn't mean to suggest we should Shanghai IP holders like that," and at least partly undo her outrageous claims. There's ways to make the argument that LL "doesn't do enough" on IP protection with real cases and real stories (if you have that belief -- I don't, and again, based on facts of my own experience) -- without suggesting that the "solution" involves outrages like that asshole's plan for self-aggrandizement. But no.

o Then she began picking on concurrency. That's a low-hanging fruit. But she never said really "compared to what," and when challenged that it was a seasonal dip, she began yammering stupidly about "seasons are different in other parts of the world" -- again, without any recognition of the real realities of seasonality, and without any *numbers for sales*. Tateru is not in business; Tateru has never been in business. Oh, maybe she makes little roses or something but basically, she is talking through her ass -- she has no experience running rentals or sims or anything but a sandbox orientation station, where she was in her element, playing 'knowier-than-though" queen to everybody else's rook, surrounded by endless pawns.

o When the Lindens and various land barons began to explain that in fact sign-ups were increasing, Tateru plunged into the reporting of more sign-ups, but with snark and with a slam on retention -- again, low-hanging fruit, but with no real journalistic *work*. Tateru never interviews anyone; there is never a live quote; there is never a visit inworld to any actual build.

See, that's what's so creepy about everything Tateru writes -- it all takes place in this completely sterile abstract sandbox world without landmarks and without feeling the ground beneath one's feet. It's all hypotheses. It's all about how "it should be" without any sense of pragmatic compromise.

The tone is always one of high dudgeon and high faux intelligentsia snark -- which is laughable coming from somebody who is top blogger dog in...a game. It's like reading a wannabee Nick Dention on gawker.com but who writes like Popular Mechanics -- there's always a disconnect.

o every week, Tateru runs a ghoulish list of Linden personnel changes, as if she's on a death watch -- you can almost hear her licking her chops that Lindens are cutting back and still firing people -- and which one will go! And was this a glitch or did they really leave! It's unseemly, given the huge Linden gouge with layoffs some time ago. I was dry-eyed then, as now, about people who had to take a hit for this platform that we've all been taking for years when we lost time or money due to the vicissitudes of virtuality. But I have to wonder if Lindens respect Tateru, when week after week, they have to read that death watch. Creepy.

o Then we had the piece about abandoned land -- with factual errors and misleading statements and wrongful conclusions. This only incited the kind of crazy comments we saw with claims of "3/4 of this continent is abandoned".

o Oh, and that silly piece about the "conversation" -- claiming SL was letting bloggers drive "the conversation". (With a strange dig at my blog, asking if it was "still going" -- what retarded assholery. ). Hmmm. The Lindens actually have had a fair number of posts up. They just don't have comments open. They work on the viewer, they post on the viewer. What would you have them do, post more thinky pieces about inworld museums like Pathfinder did on Frank Lloyd Wrong in SL? Please. And they've been doing things that just aren't Tateru's cultural channel -- bunny jams, dash deals, stuff like that.

What can you do with people like this?!

So...Half a dozen or more articles lately with absolutely pigheaded, wrongheaded, factually incorrect claims. Claims of failure when they aren't there. Claims of negligence when in fact there is effort. Claims of crashing business that don't add up. That constant artifice, that exasperated snark about the Man -- it really gets old. The 1960s died 40 years ago.

And yet what's astounding, as I say, how much the little coterie and the little clacque keeps defending this bilge. If I call it out as wrong, misleading and stupid, *I'm* the one accused of "bile," even though...I'm not the one claiming negligence, failure, mismanagement and crashing business.

If anything, if you actually read my blog, I report on positive as well as negative, and keep up an interesting stream of interesting builds and projects. *I work*. *Tateru does not work*.

That's really what it comes down to: *I work in Second Life*. *Tateru does not work in Second Life*. Tateru is a disembodied intelligence perched outside on the Internet; you suspect she only comes inworld to set up a staged screenshot for her comic strip.

Hiro Pendragon, who aptly goes by the name Zero now on Twitter (but he wasn't Zero Linden), begins nipping at my heels over my valid critique of Tateru. He demands I give the numbers. Um, I give my more considerable field reports than the...one...anecdote that Tateru has. The operative thing about abandoned land, despite its psychological meaning for so many people as a kind of totemic symbol of "failure," is that it's only...five percent. Even if it were ten or fifteen percent, it wouldn't constitute that "failure" that the mob is looking for in SL (that avid desire for failure that geeks always harbour toward every technology they deal with -- it's a vicious spleen that is really unattractive, and if you call them on it, they only claim *you're* the one with the bile ROFL).

But it's only five. And it's being reduced as we speak.

I used to read Tateru with a sense of duty, just to be aware of the range of opinion out there -- one reads Hamlet for that reason, too, although he is so lazy and derivative. Tateru at least energetically engages in her untethered abstractions.

I still go to read her at least once a week, but with a sense that this outrage just can't go on. It's enabled by her Linden hook-ups, her constant invocation of Lindens, and the Lindens constant leaking of news to her. They are the ones who have always perpetuated this unseemly chorus -- and maybe I should just conclude that they get what they deserve and leave them to it.

But I honestly can't understand how Pete Linden, let's say, whose job it is to try to spin the positive of SL (and there is positive to be spun), doesn't just tell Tateru off. It's funny *I'm* the one with the stalled press pass, even though lately, I've been filing blog stories that approve of some policies or at least give them the status of "not as bad as everything else" (Dash Deals).

My critique of SL and LL, of course, is more deeply philosophical and has to do with their absence of the rule of law, their culture as San Francisco tekkies, their adherence to opensource cultism -- all things Tateru *likes* about them. See, Tateru is like Glen Greenwald or Amy Goodman -- screeching from the harder left than lefty Obama, about how terrible he is -- even though they're all made out of the same cloth.

Even as I write this, Tateru's post is up about how the Lindens are reviewing security after the Play Station horror. I do have to marvel at all these tekkies who hate privacy, snark at us for demanding it, and hate copyright, and yet suddenly show up for data breeches like this with outrage like it's Armegeddon. So call your credit card company and change your card? Change your password? I mean, you do this all the time for other reasons in life, it's not the end of the world. So the game gods put everything in one place.

And...a dig at LL, claiming that the 2006 breech involved payment information. Airily said, as if payment/money security was compromised, when it wasn't. What kind of payment information? It was not credit card information -- so again, misleading, tendentious, wrong.

The worst thing about Tateru  -- she really is over the top! -- is her outrageous claim on Twitter that the reason I am "filled with bile" about her writing (translation: exposing her as being unjustifiably bilious herself) is because she...agrees with me. This is that odious Maggie Darwin's "insight".

But...we don't agree.

I don't think SL is failing.

I don't think concurrency is what matters -- dollar sales matter.

I don't think abandoned land is a problem, it is being dealt with, I don't like the way it's being dealt with, but it's adequate for their purposes and doesn't yet seem to so harm things that I can't live my own SL.

I don't think Linden Lab is silent, needs psychoanalysis, needs to communicate more, or needs to do anything, really, but fix search and group chat. It's been doing stuff like that, whether making the instant basic viewer or easier sign-up, and evidently with some results. I'm inclined to leave them to it. The preoccupation with the Linden entity all the time means that you can never have conversations about what you can do with this platform besides uses it as a perch to abstractly push the opensource cult.

BTW, Dusan Writer hasn't blogged in 90 days, and that's scary...and that's why someone like Tateru can come to sound louder.

Abandoned Land Resale: Can the Mainland Become Habitable Again?

Like others, I've been nervously watching how this huge dump of abandoned land is going to effect -- everything in SL. First, mainland land prices. Then mainland business in general. Then all of SL business.

It's hard to tell because we don't have good numbers. We'll have to wait until a read-out from Tyche Shepherd telling us how much former Governor Linden land is now moved over to resident ownership -- and flipped to sale again, or kept by end-users.

I see some of it going to sale...and sitting there for $1/meter, which is above market in many areas (bots even won't pick it up nowadays, even at $0.5/meter). I saw a nice parcel by the bridle path go up for $1/meter but it was right next to somebody's skyscraper, so I didn't bite.

And indeed, that's what a lot of people are doing, looking around, seeing what *else* is next to this new cheap land, and seeing whether it should get a pass or not.

Tateru, as usual, has a tendentious and misleading piece up about it.

First, she misrepresents policy and practice -- and that's likely because she has little experience in the land business, not being in rentals or sales.

Like all geeks, she thinks in the WORKS ON MY MACHINE mode, looks only at what is happening on her sim in front of her, and extrapolates from that as if it applies to the whole world:

The manual processes have certainly been erratic. My ‘home’ sim has been completely abandoned (aside from my own parcel) then bought up, reparcelled, sold off, and abandoned again and again. Five times over in five years, thus far.

Erratic seems to mean "changes hands more than once" to Tateru, but perhaps on this sim, there were long waits while the land didn't go on the auction -- possibly because no one wanted it. That isn't the norm everywhere.

Then a geek in the comments named Misa Susanowa bolsters that erroneous view, by saying WORKS THAT WAY ON MY MACHINE TOO:

Occasionally I take a hours-long ride on one of the automated vehicles that traverse my mainland continent. More than half, close to 3/4 of land there is abandoned; huge sim-wide parcels. Many of them date their abandonment as far back as 2007 and are assigned to Guy Linden as well as Governor Linden. There is more abandoned land in my own region than inhabited land. None of it has everbeen set for sale; all are set “maintenance.

Well, let me trump that, if I may. I own land on 50 sims on just about all the continents except two. I explore constantly to keep my Sacred Places and International Bazaar up to date. I rid on my Bama Boat and just fly around constantly. And I see other things going on:

o prized land goes back on the auction -- waterfront, nice mountain not ruined with ugly builds, Nautilus, etc.

o some large parcels do sit there forever, like the big piece in Duck, but likely no one asked for it

o when I have asked for land to be auctioned, it always is -- and I've filed dozens and dozens of tickets just to get the land cleared of junk next to me. In Nuba, a guy had an ugly multi-storey "gallery" that he never filled that marred the view and prevented land sales all around -- I finally reported it, the guy was found to be gone, the land went on the auction and was promptly resold in world for a high price

o I think for every parcel I've seen "sit there", I've seen them reclaimed. The entire sim next to me in Jubata was abandoned to go to Zindra, then eventually went on the auction and got broken up among other owners -- at this point, I am seeing MORE abandoned land get auctioned and/or reclaimed and resold than I am seeing it "sit there".

All of this points to the need for FACTS and not anecdotal WORKS ON MY MACHINE stuff. Especially from those always with the hairpin jammed on the slot forcing the button to say I HATE SL the way it is for Tateru Nino. People *want* to say the Mainland is crappy and ugly and fulfills their dire prophecies of "the land model not working" (Hamlet) or to drive island sales (Desmond)  so they seize on this issue to bruit up without factual underpinnings.

Given that Tyche Shepherd's statistics, scraped from monitoring sims, tell us 5 percent of the Mainland was abandoned, this furry's notion that "3/4 of the continent is abandoned" is just a subjective impression that doesn't contain the facts.

And it's not true that you could go to the Lindens and ask for "any size" abandoned land to be purchased. In fact, they had their cut-off point, which I found to range from 1024-2048, depending on the sim. Small parcels of 16 or 32 or 256 wouldn't get any question if you wanted them set to sale, and the rule of the "three sides ownership" didn't always apply for those dinky parcels. If you owned on 3 sides of a 1024 or 2048, yes, you could likely claim it.

But over that, it was sometimes denied. I had that experience a number of times on high-prized sims like Sutherland. A piece there that wasn't particularly desirable itself went on the auction (on the sheer face of a cliff, which most people wouldn't want to build on) but was in Sutherland, where land goes for a higher price usually because it's a nice sim where the people generally keep it nice (barring Peridita's escapades of late, which were appalling and finally ended after way too long). If I'm not mistaken, that piece then got flipped and Perdita then bought it. I didn't really want it, but was going to get it for prims, and wanted to see if I could request it to avoid having it be exposed to griefing/clubs/flippers, etc.

So no, the Lindens have not always honoured requests for larger parcels -- except when they do. They do this at their discretion. That doesn't bother me, really, but the auction is annoying. We could prevent some of its worse abuses if we had transparency on the bid list after the bid closed, so we can see who is bidding up the parcels. If consistently, certain businesses constantly enter bids and deliberately bid them up and withdraw, merely to drive up the price of mainland for their own interests, that's not capitalism, that's cronyism with Lindens colluding in keeping the price high to have a higher sink and sell more currency and get more commissions. Free markets need free information; a market that is ostensibly free but has hidden who is buying in it, or bidding to drive up prices, is that much less free.

It was my theory, based on the past transparency of the old auction, that if you had the names publicized, that would prevent certain land barons from repeatedly entering bids merely to jack up prices.

I've now had the experience of griefers deliberately buying parcels next to mine -- and even buying them again after being seized, and having them go on the market again, even for high prices.

Of course, there's the notorious Woodbury griefing that went on in Ravenglass and Furness, where b-tards deliberately bought these parcels to use as a place d'armes to launch griefing attacks. The Lindens seized the Furness land again after it was used again - I was shuddering to think what was going to finally happen to that Ravenglass land after it went back on the auction. I wasn't going to get into a bidding war over it, and it had a high chance of being bought by griefers -- price is no option for these "poor students" I've found, as they bought a ridiculously-priced parcel before (Shaun Altman, the poor little rich boy, would help them, as would Intlibber).

So there were two parcels on Ravenglass, one the 2048 m formerly the property of Woodbury and used for hundreds of griefing attacks and grief builds, and then another parcel, approximately 4330 meters, that was originally purchased by an oldbie with a charter 4096 for life who called himself "the King of SL" but who then sold the parcel and it went to Scout Detritus, a Gorean weapons dealer and Woodbury regular who built the infamous Refrigerator of Ravenglass, a huge grief-build that he kept up for something like 3.5 years or more, I'd have to check -- until he, too, was permabanned.

I had no desire to play "let's seize your base" with these people (they played it with me, I ignored them, abuse-reported them when appropriate, and didn't buy land jacked up in price just to rid myself of them).

So when I heard about the new abandoned land policy, I wrote to Concierge and petitioned outright: please sell me those parcels for $1/meter because they are a constant source of griefing, a griefer is likely to buy it, and if you sell it to me, you will spare yourself staff time and trouble tickets. After all, I originally purchased the entire sim on the auction, I then sold most of it to customers who were law-abiding, but then some of them put it on the open market or gave/sold it to griefers, hence the four year griefing period.

I heard nothing for some time, and then to my surprise, I was asked if I would like to buy it for $1/m. I had to scramble to add tier annoyingly from an alt to avoid a tier up of a half sim at the discount which I may wind up doing now anyway -- although fortunately I was able to find a generous donor for the SL Public Land Preserve to plug that gap.

Ann Otoole has cried "FIC" at larger parcels going to direct sales like this, but I don't see why the Lindens can't have a policy where anyone can be sold land on their sim where they also own land, by filing a ticket. I honestly don't believe there are going to be that many tickets.

Um, only 500 businesses run the overwhelming majority of the SL economy, remember? Remember how you are supposed to hate on the rich? Most of them are on islands, however. On mainland, let's say there are perhaps at the most, soaking wet, perhaps 50 big businesses requiring lots of land -- as in 50 sims or 100 sims. Most of them are more the mom-and-pop or medium size like me (I manage about 14 sims, including the land preserve where the tier is shared with donors, and also take tier donation in lieu of cash rent).

Add to that perhaps a few hundred people who just want another parcel for prims or to add to a build, who might get 4096 or 8192 -- but not much more than that. Remember, mainland isn't more than 5,000 resident sims anyway. People won't want more. That's because to buy more than 8192, which is $40 tier, you have to go to the $75 mark -- and then some people start saying to themselves, why don't I just get a homestead if I'm paying this much? For $345 set up and $125 a month, you can have a 65,556 meter stand-alone sim island with 3750 prims only, but it's all yours, with no uglies in the view.

So really, the demand for special tickets to claim parcels larger than the 2048 that seemed to be the LL "official" limit are likely to be small in number, and therefore should simply be set up that way.

Indeed, the Lindens seem to be tacitly doing this, cries of FIC notwithstanding. Um, I guess I'm not feeling very FIC'd up if I get to (make that: *have to*) buy back land that I once sold on the open market, to prevent griefing, after being griefed for four years on my flagship sim.That sort of grimly defensive buying isn't FICing -- it's punishment for being on the Mainland.

The rule is that only newly-abandoned land will now go to sale for $1/meter. Some have remarked this might drive prices *up* instead of down, as that's now an enforced "bottom rate" higher than the going rate. We'll see.

Let's remember what the figures were -- it was something like 5 percent of the mainland is abandoned.

Another thing Tateru gets wrong is the notion that the auction was "erratic". I never saw anything "erratic" about it. If there was a parcel you saw abandoned, piling up with junk, whose owner seemed to have abandoned it while it still remained in their name, you could easily file a ticket and the Lindens would look at it quickly. To be sure, after their big layoffs, they slowed way down in getting to these tickets, taking weeks at a time, but finally they got back up to speed again and worked quickly -- they are motivated to get hard cash tier on abandoned land just as much as anyone.

Nova Linden may have been involved, but Guy Linden also handled these parcels as did Izzy Linden and some others -- and they went up on the auction and got bought -- if you wanted to, you could bid with others or just do the good deed of freeing up the junk-piled land for use.

The auctions didn't always have lots of entries, but that was likely because some things would go up and not sell, which was a pain to then have to re-insert into the system, so probably the Lindens tried to put up only what they knew would sell, although large tracts seem to remain for long times inworld for no apparent reason. Even so, "erratic" is an unfair adjective to apply to a process that generally ran at a clip and again -- Tateru isn't a land buyer and doesn't seem to grasp this -- if you had your eye on land and wanted it, they would put it on the auction fairly quickly and not because you were "FIC" but for anyone, as the record shows.

I'm hoping that instead of another Linden-induced glut of the landmarket cratering the economy again (a very strong possibility), this could lead to a Mainland Renaissance. There are some factors that could work in favour of such a Revival of the Burnt-Out Place:

o LPDW has been doing remarkable things, building roads, railroads, bridle paths (as I've been saying), interesting little builds, parks, sailing areas, the funhouse in Pyri -- lots and lots of stuff that is attractive to be next to. Linden "protected" has always been a high value for real estate -- the highest, really -- and the Lindens have made a lot of stuff "protected" with more than just a road or open sea, but nice stuff to look at that won't change in the view. That should help raise prices and sell land.

o the Lindens have also eradicated most ad farms and while they have outbreaks again frequently, they are on them again frequently. Even Lindens who "don't do this as their job" are willing to come and pitch in and remove ad-farms, so they are enforcing the policy

o the Lindens have put in an automatic feature that -- had it been put in years ago -- would have made for much less war on the Mainland, but now still comes in handy for peace-building. And that is the "anti-encroachment" feature. Now, if you try to put a tree near the border so that it waves into your neighbours' land as a form of deliberate annoyance (or even as an accident), you won't be able to do that. It will bounce you back. Yay! I was worried what this would mean for existing builds across Linden water, such as I have commissioned with a few bridges (and so have thousands of others all over the Mainland, fly around and look). Answer from Andrew: no, it will be done on a discretionary basis by Lindens, manually if it goes on Linden land, i.e. they will not turn on this feature automatically. Well, let's hope so.

Even so, there are still several big challenges to Mainland:

o clubs -- these are an evergreen annoyance as the people with them take up all the avatar slots. However, they don't take them up with camp-sitting and bots as much as they could before (certainly there is almost no camping at all -- I see a camp chair about once every six months), so that means they have a harder time putting 40 avatars on a sim. Clubs mean shooting, fights, annoyances, so they are never good to be next to, but some of the biggest ones now go on homesteads or islands so they are not the egregious nuisance they were five years ago

o AnnMarie Otoole/AnnMarie Oleander vehicle nuisances. I've AR'd her a half dozen times lately for: cars on the bridle path, buses in the sea, cars on the railroad tracks, cars hitting me on my land, etc. She is an overbred nuisance selling and soliciting on Linden land, she must go. Keep ARing her, have AR parties, get the job done.

o ugly builds. These, like the poor, ye shall always have with you. There are still people who think their purpose in life is to come on a bucolic rolling grassland with nothing but farms and horses grazing and put up a skyscraper, or who think an ugly glowing shopping mall belongs on a highpriced waterfront. These people are terminably stupid and it's hard to reason with them. I usually wait 30 days for things like that to go away -- they often do. I sometimes try IM'ing the person and asking if they are serious about those giant megaprim boards they've left out in the sun to dry for 21 days -- could they texture them maybe? And sometimes that works to get rid of them. After a month or two, I move. There's a lot of land in SL. If it doesn't sell or rent because it's next to an ugly, move. To be sure, I have four-sim areas where I can't do that, and I'm stuck with ugliness like the insane dulce Tiramiseau of Morraine who has up these giant boards of the sky as if...we weren't in a virtual world with a simulated sky and river and trees...already. It's beyond me. Above her alpine meadow with the giant boards and photorealism (which always looks awful in SL), she also has a Carribean waterfalls/beach scene thing going up in a skybox that looks like a box...how can people stand looking at things like this??? Have you never heard of "2048" as a good height for a skybox??? Even 256 would ease the eye considerably!

Even so, the combination of the economy picking up, the LPDW having created a lot of nice builds, and the fact that not ALL abandoned land but only NEWLY abandoned land will be dumped makes all this a bit more tolerable -- but still offensive.

Because they could have initially announced that they will have a system whereby the land first goes on a raffle or random basis to all owners in the sim, on a rotation. If there can be a system that holds it for the original owner for 3 days, then you can have it go: original owner -- 3, immediately adjacent owner--3, largest owner -- 3, second-largest owner--3, etc. There isn't a technical reason why that can't be done...I don't think. Although I couldn't get Andrew Linden to say much about it because they were on a gag order on all things related to this aspect of abandoned land. It is strange, truly.

The Lindens always worry that things won't "scale". What they mean by that is "we can't scale". So they look for automatic solutions, and although the exercise organic discretion and not coded automatism most of the time on most things, they always pretend that they can't or won't do that.

So I'm hoping that the Lindens will mitigate this potentially awful thing with abandoned land by now accepting tickets from people who really want land. I've always held to the principle that if someone really wants land, and wants to pay for it, you shouldn't get in their way. Unless it's part of a complex of rentals, if it's just standing alone on a sim I will usually sell it if it isn't rented. The Lindens should have the same attitude -- it really isn't going to be some pile of tickets (certainly a fraction of the pile of tickets they used to face about abandoned land piling up with junk needing cleaning, or needing to be put on the auction -- fraction, because now they have a system whereby all NEW land immediately goes to sale). On the Mainland, it makes for happier neighbours and happiness in general if you can do that.

There's a better way, of course, and that is for people not to abandon land, but IM their neighbours and ask them to buy it. Having a tier bill come due in the middle of the night makes people not do that often, however.

But, if you see land available still to be bought back by the owner, you could IM him and tell him to buy it back, then sell it to you. However, there's a hobble in using that workaround of the system -- I'm not sure you can *see* that status of "3 day period while owner can buy it" -- I'd have to see if it is visible as a function of being set to the owner's name by Governor Linden or how it works.

This thread was annoying for the predictable fanboyz that showed up to cheer the Lindens -- fanboyz who don't buy land that I can see, and who don't understand the risks and losses of abandoned land next to their own land -- they just like the theory of it and just want to appear as cheerleaders.

There's another open question -- is this Governor Linden $1 land in search or not? The Lindens say not, i.e. to prevent bots, I guess...or something. Yet people are finding it in search. That might be due to the description being unchanged by flippers, but it needs checking.