Crap Mariner's advertising machinima for SL9B -- with the Grim Reaper.
Saffia Widdershins of PrimPerfect is doing a good deed and organizing SL9B, since the Lindens aren't doing it themselves this year, in preparation for weening us from them for...for whatever it is they are doing as the Next Step with new products or even closing this project we've all worked on for 7 or 8 years.
But why on earth she let the soul-poisoned Crap Mariner at this enterprise is beyond me.
Somehow, she's gone ahead and commissioned him to make ads for the event -- or let him manifest his, um, creativity in the spirit of collectivism...or something...and it's really macabre.
He's decided to make an Grim Reaper avatar to play endlessly on the theme that "SL is dying" yuk yuk har har. It is not Halloween, people. If you are trying to inspire people to enter into a community-spirited effort to show SL is *not* dying, this seems like a bad joke. A joke that might have been possible to carry out with a little less blackheartedness and a little more talent. But it flops.
Maybe SL *is* dying -- Crap Mariner has been saying the Doomsday Clock is at five minutes to midnight for the last five years. But it's an awful creepy thing to have for a birthday. Is Saffia counting on the meta-noir-uber-cool hipsters of Second Life to accept this as in fact a metaphor for a picnic of happy people eating noodle salads? Is it supposed to take the internalized fears of the population and externalize them all as "good, clean, fun?"
There's no question that it has gone too far, however, with the latest round that shows Crap as the Grim Reaper describing his build for the SL9B which is...a pile of skulls, looking like the Cambodian genocide. Ugh.
Worse, he points to some of the skulls jokingly and says, referring to Lindens who have been laid off -- "There's Pathfinder...there's Blue..." Ugh.
I don't care for these Lindens, and find Pathfinder particularly cunning and manipulative and Blue a disappointment despite his virtues, but it would never occur to me to somehow simulate their killing and gruesome display of their dead skulls. It's awful. It's sick. It's not funny.
It's Aspberger's syndrome.
I've had more and more evidence lately with various go-arounds particularly on G+ of the awful side of Aspberger's. People tend to describe this disorder from the victim's perspective and sympathetically -- the poor victim cannot socialize properly with others, he doesn't talk, or he doesn't make facial expressions, or he misses social cues, or he feels isolated or whatever.
But the other side of the passive, emotionless, expressionless Aspberger's patient is a wild, vicious emotional firehose of hate. That may not manifest all the time or in all patients, but it does enough of the time and in enough of a pattern to mark. What people don't realize in dealing with Aspberger's, so much is the story told from the victim's perspective, is that there is the flip side of it, this other side of the coin. If the social mechanisms in the human brain are broken, if social cues are missed or socializing language never learned, there's also present the correlation -- at times wildly hateful insanely nasty shit inflicted on people with callous abandon, completely out of proportion to the perceived offense or slight, or even completely irrelevant.
It's like the way Crap became hugely outraged and volatile and rageful over a simple comment on my part that his avatar, in becoming more human (away from its robot stage) was entering the Uncanny Valley, i.e. the point at which robots are not real enough to be acceptable, but too real to be seen as robots -- and therefore become creepy. It was merely a joke, and certainly one he would find funny if he were normal.
But his reaction -- years and years of vicious and vitriolic rage fits, name-calling, slurs, libels and hate -- is completely out of proportion to anything whatsoever. Yet it stands, and we're supposed to be sympathetic.
In the same way Shava Suntzu, a bright, interesting person with lots of knowledge and ability, goes into rage fits over my legitimate criticism of Jacob Appelbaum, and spews unreasonable hatred and false claims on the list Liberationtech until it is censored by the overzealous moderator (I'm not for censoring such speech), and then continues for days on end in a rage, attributing all these nefarious and cunning and malicious motivations to me. I suddenly realized (I had not before) that she must be an Aspberger's sufferer, like Crap, because her reaction was just like Crap's. Then I started seeing this side to a few other Aspberger's patients -- or likely candidates on G+.
Thus Aspberger's becomes a social disease, a disorder of one person's mind and behaviour with consequences in society because others then become the direct victims of this bad behaviour, they then react with further defense or even attacks on their attacker, making the Asperberger's patient feel as if he is unfairly abused, and misunderstood, and unjustly bullied, etc. It's astounding how much Crap and Shava use the term "bullying" for someone just standing up to what is in fact their own initial out-of-proportion nastiness and bullying.
Surely this phenomenon is exacerbated by the Internet!
There is all this hope that virtual worlds will help autism patients who are unable to socialize normally with all the social cues and clues internalized in the child's development that are just broken, either for reasons of genetics or environment or both. And that's encouraging and something we can employ SL for. But there has to be more and it has to be about admitting and publicizing this bad behaviour and working toward curbing it as well.
The Aspberger's syndrome is not new, even if formally discovered in the 1940s. In reading the novels of Kathleen Norris, a writer of the early 19th century who wrote numerous novels about women's lives that provide a treasure-house of cultural information, again and again, we see the character of the thin-skinned, easily offended, haughtily arrogant male who makes life miserable for everyone around him and who never changes his behaviour. He appears sullen and unable to communicate; he bursts out with non-sequiturs -- he is consumed with some invention he is tinkering on or some scientific experient or get-rich-scheme involving a gadget. This type of person frequently becomes an alcoholic or drug abuser. In California, he seems the prototype a century ago of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He is endlessly unhappy and uncomfortable and demanding that others wait on him and absorb all the consequences of his bad behaviour. He can't hold a job, and is always blaming a series of bosses who give him second chances -- they're always at fault, and they tolerate him because he's brilliant. He suspects the worst in everyone, and is paranoid and suspicious and it ends badly, most of the time.
I saw this recently on Facebook with a Russian emigre I know -- he went into a sulking and nasty fit because he and his organization weren't mentioned in a blog post I did -- it was crazy because it wasn't a blog post about those sorts of organizations but was something completely different. It was all out of proportion and unwarranted, and others called him out on it. I defended myself firmly, and he spiralled into a further abusive rage. Having worked with him for years, I know exactly what he suffers from: Aspberger's syndrome. It is not curable. I'm not even sure it is treatable.
Recently, Loren Feldman of 1938 Media had the courage (he always does) to say simply what an asshole Mark Zuckerberg was, for screwing so many people on this IPO stock thing. He simply said that Zuck was unable to shake hands like a man, that his eyes were darting everywhere. "He is definitely on the spectrum," he said, meaning "on the autism spectrum," which is where Aspbergers is located.
We are supposed to have endless sympathy for people suffering from a disorder inherent from their birth, or exacerbated by their environment, and we are to treat this phenomenon as we would, say, cerebral palsy.
The problem, as I point out, is that it is more than a disease that is suffered by one person. It's a social disease that makes others victims -- sometimes on a large scale. Zuckerberg's lack of empathy and lack of social cues is a worldwide phenomenon now. You can say he's a poor little rich boy suffering from having a position "on the spectrum," but we are all victims in the end.
I don't have the answers for this social problem, but I think the first step is reporting on it honestly and admitting honestly the abusive side of Asperbergers. Nobody should have to suffer this kind of abuse under some notion of political correctness. Part of the treatment has to include making the victim aware of the consequences of his actions on others, so that he can prevent further abuse of them -- and then himself in the inevitable cycle of reaction. That can't happen if we are to treat every Aspberger's patient as an entitlement-rich despot who gets to do whatever he wants because he has a diagnosis.
What bothers me about this phenomenon is how much scientific reporting and popular science reporting there is on the disorder that do not reflect the outrageously abusive side of the personality. We're told again and again that the individual is listless or dispassionate or lacking empathy, is silent and awkward, or conversely, overly verbose and monotonous (but never described as abusive), can't communicate normally with social cues, can't socialize, and engages in ritualistic or ordering behaviour, like lining up toys all over the place or memorizing molecular or mathematical information, etc.
What no one is admitting -- or perhaps they are missing -- is the manifestation of pure assholery from quite a few of these individuals -- wildly inappropriate and malicious attacks on the strength of perceived, imagined slights. Sudden bursts of vicious, persistent, burn-their-houses-down behaviour particularly on the Internet. Why does this get a pass?
Years ago, I wrote Philip Linden an email. I pointed out that he had not one, not two, but *three Aspberger's patients running the new-user experience* in the welcome area. This was about two too many, if not three too many. It was unacceptable, whatever our hopes for SL as a vehicle for helping those on the autism spectrum. People with normal abilities had to be served, too. I figured that the insane out-of-touch literalist stuff in the welcome and orientation areas was a function of Aspberger's. Remember that giant spinning *thing* with the all-caps announcement, "F1 IS NOW IN THE CLIENT"? It may still be there. Do you think the average person entering SL *cared* that "F1" -- whatever that was -- was "in the client" -- whatever that was? Der, I know what it was, but so what? Most people entering this virtual world to socialize or learn did not know, and shouldn't have to know.
Or how about that creepy game where you were supposed to jump in a car and drive -- one of the notoriously difficult things of SL, not only due to sim seams but due to physics and script lag -- and then run over and kill bot-rats, who would squish and look like road kill? Whose sick idea was that? Would you come to a virtual world seeking socializing, education, and business if you knew that the first thing you had to do was duck a giant spinning thing overhead telling you something incomprehensible, and then go squish rats dead on a road in a balky vehicle? Did they think SL should only be filled with other Aspberger's patients?
Indeed, it has been, due to the very high incidence of those with disorders "on the spectrum" in computer science, because of the predilection for this type of mind for order, numbers, memorizing long chains of things, etc.
But it's a way of life infecting the rest of us and I think it's time to speak out more about this.
The mental illness issue with linden lab is real but will not be treated. One must admit they are sick before treatment can begin. However, what SL is will live on without the lindens. They cannot take that ball and run from the playground. The lindens have lost the ball.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | June 04, 2012 at 09:37 AM
Like it or not, SL and its associated out-of-world hangouts is a place people have chosen seek like-minded people rather than diversity. I believe SL's lack of appeal for normal people is considered a positive feature by its residents, and their corner of the internet is actively defended from the ignorant masses, and I believe the lack of attention SL is receiving from LL these days may be LL throwing their hands up in resignation. I believe they may have given up on the whole virtual world concept as likely to attract the same anti-social crowd no matter the platform.
Posted by: Anya Ristow | June 04, 2012 at 11:05 AM
I'm afraid I must take the credit/blame for the notorious "F1" spinner. After reading your most recent blog post, I pulled one out of inventory. It said "PRESS "F1" FOR HELP" in large letters, and then below it "SECOND LIFE HELP IS NOW PART OF THE CLIENT".
At the time, that last bit was a big thing. SL had never before had anything in the client you could use to get help. (The mind boggles that it took them till 2006/2007 to add that.)
The spinner was originally made for NCI, and was later used (with permission), along with some other NCI stuff by the resident creators of the original "Help Island". (LL had very little to do with the first "Help Island"; I think it was mostly Tateru Nino's work.)
Though the first "Help Island" certainly had its problems, it did provide a useful next step from the original Orientation Island with the talking parrot. Considering that Linden Lab replaced the OI/HI combo with the horribly designed "New OI" that featured mandatory completion of four orientation tasks while wearing a HUD (that often didn't work, causing a significant number of new users to just quit without ever getting to the mainland) and the whole "running over cyber-rats" bit, it made the old Help Island looked pretty good in retrospect.
It's my understanding that the metrics for the second try at an Orientation Island (which I'm tempted to blame on ESC, but I could be wrong there) were so bad, that LL decided they were better off with NO orientation rather than using that island. For at least six months to a year after they pulled the "cyber-rat" version of Orientation Island, they were dumping new users straight to the old Help Islands.
I'm still continually amazed at how badly and consistently Linden Lab screws up the first hour experience. People used to speculate that this was intentional, as they knew their architecture could never handle much more active users than they had at the time. However, I don't think Linden Lab was that smart--or that dumb.
Posted by: Carl Metropolitan | June 04, 2012 at 04:38 PM
As I've said in-world, it isn't only Second Life that suffers the disconnect between mainstream and developers/hardcore gamers.
In game after game, I've seen developers and the "hardcore" take this obtuse stance that withstands against all reason. WoW itself crashed into a wall because they wanted to turn everyone into obsessed, min maxing raiders. It annoyed the developers and the hardcore that people were turning WoW into socializing place, a theme park not a lifestyle.
Developers will churn out raid after raid that excludes 95% of their paying audience but absolutely refuse to create housing in games (which the excluded 95% beg for). It is large and also little things that show that these people are their own worst enemies. That they would rather see their creations die than give one inch. I suppose we must have some sympathy if many of them do suffer from Aspbergers. But it has gotten to a point where most are saying enough and they are leaving games.
Posted by: melponeme_k | June 04, 2012 at 06:16 PM
So which particular part of the Autistic Spectrum do YOU inhabit, Prok? Pep (has done the test, and despite wanting to have a reason for malcommunication, failed to place the blame at the door of this neurological syndrome.) PS So it MUST be the rest of you that have the problem! PPS Along with the forum masochism thing.
Posted by: Pep | June 04, 2012 at 06:23 PM
type A personalities will develop MIPS
type B personalities will continue to show autistic behaviors as the plugs connect deeper and deeper.
scary shit this mediaverse stuff..
full speed ahead.
Posted by: c3 | June 04, 2012 at 08:19 PM
Carl,
While I don't believe you are an aspie yourself, and while you say you are responsible for the "F1 is in the client" spinner, perhaps you were infected by folie a deux from the aspies on the island. It's wacky ding hoy stuff, and perhaps you've lost touch with that.
Most normal people do not use the F keys -- or at least, only one or two of them. The F1 Help was a disaster -- if you did click it, it lagged out your game, and took forever to pull up the balky "knowledge base," which was way more than anyone needed to know, especially on day one. It was like dumping a set of encyclopedias on a newbie's head as he landed. The system they have now in the client -- with no F1 but right there to be accessed on the viewer -- is much shorter and more basic and does the trick (on viewers 2 and 3).
The reason why I recall this as "F1 is in the client" is because it was round and spinning, and so you could only see parts of phrases at a time, adding to the surreal aspect of the entire crazy thing, you know?
I think the very, very first Orientation Island was built by Ben Linden or one of the early Lindens, and then Tateru, Torley and others got their hands on it. For a time, it was infested with "SL Mentors" -- and as a way of trying to deal with the problem of SL Mentors literally hijacking newbies to their stores or rentals from orientation, they put in as a sop the ability for the Mentors to have their stores rotate on the first place newbies landed. These stories might have had freebies or dollarbies, but they added free advertising for these "altruistic folks" as their compensation.
That, and my pet peeve -- the random delivery of landmarks that ensured constant load disbalance -- instead of sequential delivery that would have balanced the load better -- added to the madness and sense of special interests on parade.
Obviously the "four tasks" orientation that even gave a few Linden dollars just wasn't working. People lost patience with it. I ran through it a few times myself to test it and found that the HUD simply wouldn't load, or stuff wouldn't happen as it was supposed to. I thought the talking parrot was a distraction and annoyance.
I believe the deliberate screwing of newbies *was* intention not just to throttle the load on the servers, which weren't scaling very fast, but to winnow out all the feebs and choads so that only the true geeks could filter through, which his all that LL wanted. They wanted content producers and scripters -- they had a notion of developing a very attractive world first, and then selling that or leasing that in some fashion before the masses entered. They actually thought, however, that there would be more of a mass base of pure geeks than there were.
I don't inhabit the autism spectrum, Pep. I wouldn't try to diagnose oneself with an Internet test, however, that's not reliable.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | June 04, 2012 at 09:13 PM
I know I'm not supposed to comment here but that's not changed my direct perspective of him, but it has opened my eyes to the bigger picture.
I didn't think he was ill or had such an affliction, I just thought he was depressed and filled with regular deep seeded hate, the kind you only get when you've played the same hand and not won anything and are running in massive debt with no shirt on your back.
Then after trying to blame the dealer for your own actions you find out hes not been cheating and you've just been too dumb blinded to realize you're playing a loosing hand that could never win.
Either way he was and always will be the founder the main circle of negativity inSL that his literalistic liberal friends push and give credence to so that he can drive that hate filled drama wedge into the entire community as they stick him on a SLebrity pedestal as if parody and just for fun does not cause damage, when it's clear he's hiding behind that masquerade and is totally serious and decrepit of moral judgment.
Those that support him are themselves stuck languishing in the disrepair of their lost in-world dreams and fantasies and can't lash out themselves so use him as an attack dog for all manner of causes, acts like getting people to 'love' his post for alleged 'charity' on mySL is a decrepit abomination that he's using charity to grant himself some self-illusion of what he does is worthy to the community and to show Linden Lab and naysayers that he should stay doing what hes doing.
I'm not stupid I can clearly see the hand he plays, but I haven't said anything until now.
But it's OK crap never messed around when it's charity!! it's just as bad as paying for FB likes, if he wanted to donate $ to charity he should just do it and not be dangling it as a 'feel good factor' to make sure people click the 'love' button aka chew the carrot to get his self esteem up, and fake that hes a good influence on the community.
I bet 40% of those who say they like him and support what he does only do so because they don't want him blogging negatively about them and their business.. it's a charade..
But who can go up against crap? it seems the perfect disguise for someone so hate filled to hide themselves in plane sight as a piece of trash.. he was crap to begin with and always will be the same old crap, and if it's true he has Asperbergers then more so the shame on those who have failed to use the initial push and podium they gave him for sympathy and their liberal ideals to inch him towards a positive light, as it's quite clear it was wrong for them to make him the focus of the Second Life community, community is about more than giving podium to someone potentially able to destroy it.
While I think everyone is entitled to take part in the SL community regardless of who they are and what they're background is, my view is someone who has a personalty disorder should not be pushed into the spotlight as a thought leader as a community needs to be stable not a roller coaster of collateral drama.
I know Immy has issues and I've tried to befriend her but it's an uphill struggle to get her to acknowledge I exist when she bathes in her own negativity thinking I don't think she exists, see the problem?.
I believe to be POTUS you have to be of sound mind and body? or in most positions of power regardless of policies, but clearly crap is not fit to be SL's community POTSL, and anyone who languishes in the joke or alleged parody he projects as a mask while ignoring the damage he's doing underneath not only to himself like I'm sure botgirl will do, is inept of sound judgment and should go see a psychiatrist themselves.
Posted by: Bunjie | June 04, 2012 at 09:33 PM
http://www.johnrobison.com/about-john.php
saw a tv documentary segment recently on this guy... has some experimental treatments to "rewire" his brain...
now i do beleive some ae born with organic brain pathway issues..
but im more and more convinced that the interaction with the digital interface and the computer/ and its designers artifacts... are now rewireing "normal" organic brains....
ive stated this for a decade plus now... seems like on many things.. im ahead of the curve, and not wrong alot;) nowadays.
we'll see.
Posted by: c3 | June 05, 2012 at 12:33 AM
"but im more and more convinced that the interaction with the digital interface and the computer/ and its designers artifacts... are now rewireing "normal" organic brains"
Definitely it is changing the way people think. It is flattening our social responses.
In relation to gaming it has convinced many that forced groups are "socializing". It has these people convinced that "casuals" or "solo players" don't socialize. Asperberger types need standardized grouping activities to encourage socialization. They don't do the freestyle chats that the majority do. They don't understand that people are still socializing if they are not grouped up.
What is horrific is that many normal people are convinced they are actually making an effort to socialize by pinging somebody on Facebook. That a little brain blurb written on someone's FB page constitutes actually being a friend and caring about their lives. Its making us less empathetic and less able to create normal connections.
Posted by: melponeme_k | June 05, 2012 at 01:15 AM
@C3: Baroness Susan Greenfield doesn't just believe the same as you, she has spent some time measuring the change in our brains caused by exposure to fanatical paranoids on the 'net. Pep (Or was it just the "to be continued" syndrome of violent impatience with web pages that continue beneath the fold?) PS Prok, what on earth - or whichever planet you inhabit - makes you think that I would rely on an "internet test" to assess my sanity? Don't judge other people by your own personal gullibility and shame.
Posted by: Pep | June 05, 2012 at 01:30 AM
It's hard to believe that this frothing-at-the-mouth rant about Asperger Syndrome, written by someone who doesn't care or know enough even to spell it correctly, but nevertheless has the gall to diagnose someone else with it, has lead to these serious responses. A pox on all your houses for that. This rambling bit of bitter nastiness deserves to rot in a corner of the internet.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | June 05, 2012 at 01:40 PM
hard to believe? then you havent spent enough time interfacing through a machine..
baroness geenfield- first i heard of her.. i just did some googling....
her hypothesis/writings seem to be about organic responses to interactions... not exposure to the ideas of others, crazy or not.
you can spout all the crazy you like... without physical duress i most likely wont buy it... but take a scalpel or waterboard to my head... and i might see 5 lights...
Posted by: c3 | June 05, 2012 at 05:05 PM
1. I'm not diagnosing, these people say themselves that they suffer from Asperger's syndrome -- and it's easy to keep mispelling this word, even after looking it up repeatedly.
What I'm doing is *fighting back* against the nastiness of these aspies. THEY start out spewing the nastiness, and instead of just falling silent and being scared into inaction, *I fight back*.
And I particularly don't like the idea of making fun of mass murder, piles of skulls, and calling former Lindens victims of mass murder when all that happened to them is that they got let go from a virtual world company.
mel really has an insight here about the *forced* socializing. The collectivized gaming group that is hoaxed into thinking it is a "community". Spot on.
Pep, do you have a poor memory or are you hallucinating? Here's what you wrote: "Pep (has done the test, and despite wanting to have a reason for malcommunication, failed to place the blame at the door of this neurological syndrome.)". That tells us *you did the Internet test*. If it wasn't on the Internet, well, geez, it sure sounded like it was.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | June 05, 2012 at 09:43 PM
Hey Prok, you are demonstrating an inability to hold up your end of the communications dyad, which may be linked to your position on the autistic spectrum, or perhaps the commonplace genetic failing of your sex, which is that you hear what you would like to rather than what is actually said. Pep (If I had said that I had passed my driving test, would you have assumed that I meant I had worked out how to wear a SL car?) PS Like my wife who tacks on an unspoken "Now!" on the end ofher every request for assistance, you seem to insert the epithet "internet" in front of concepts to your own monomaniac convenience; or do you believe my propaganda that Pep is an internet construct who does not actually exist other than in the imagination of his readers?
Posted by: Pep | June 06, 2012 at 02:59 AM
Prokofy wrote: "While I don't believe you are an aspie yourself, and while you say you are responsible for the "F1 is in the client" spinner, perhaps you were infected by folie a deux from the aspies on the island. It's wacky ding hoy stuff, and perhaps you've lost touch with that."
I do have some personality issues that might put me on the borderline. The notoriously unreliable internet tests I've taken generally put me just outside of what would be consider Asbergers. If so, it has actually helped me in Second Life, as I've been able to understand and deal well with a number of people that are probably well in the Asbergers spectrum, while at the same time dealing with the rest of the world in a more typical and professional manner.
As for the spinner, it was not my decision to place it at the center of Help Island. I created it as one of a number of instructional posters at NCI. I think it worked better in the original context. On the other hand, I don't want to in any way diminish what Tateru and others did with the original Help Island. It mostly worked very well for what it was designed for--and filled that need far longer than any of the designers anticipated.
Prokofy wrote "Most normal people do not use the F keys -- or at least, only one or two of them. The F1 Help was a disaster -- if you did click it, it lagged out your game, and took forever to pull up the balky "knowledge base," which was way more than anyone needed to know, especially on day one. It was like dumping a set of encyclopedias on a newbie's head as he landed."
I'm the kind of guy who read the encyclopedia (1972 World Book) from A to Z when he was a kid, so I see that as a feature, not a bug. However at NCI that poster was just one way of getting help. NCI (and Oxbridge) were designed intentionally to address different ways of learning. People that need to talk to other people find other people to help them. People that learn best in formal classes find classes. People that learn well from tutorials, find those. And people who read the manual, get links to the manual, etc.
Prokofy wrote "The reason why I recall this as "F1 is in the client" is because it was round and spinning, and so you could only see parts of phrases at a time, adding to the surreal aspect of the entire crazy thing, you know?"
Agreed. That was a design error on my part. I had a fascination with spinning posters for a while that I've since abandoned.
Prokofy wrote: "I think the very, very first Orientation Island was built by Ben Linden or one of the early Lindens, and then Tateru, Torley and others got their hands on it. For a time, it was infested with "SL Mentors" -- and as a way of trying to deal with the problem of SL Mentors literally hijacking newbies to their stores or rentals from orientation, they put in as a sop the ability for the Mentors to have their stores rotate on the first place newbies landed. These stories might have had freebies or dollarbies, but they added free advertising for these "altruistic folks" as their compensation."
I think you may be conflating Orientation Island with Help Island. Help Island was the place that the mentors used to hang out and had the controversy of some creator's stuff being featured in the freebie store with no mechanism for other creators to have theirs added. Interestingly enough, when Blue was in charge of Help Island he outsourced the HI freebies to NCI and we ended up with our FreebieNode system (which was open to anyone who met the basic quality and PG requirements) on all the Help Islands.
Prokofy wrote: "That, and my pet peeve -- the random delivery of landmarks that ensured constant load disbalance -- instead of sequential delivery that would have balanced the load better -- added to the madness and sense of special interests on parade."
To the best of my knowledge that remained broken until the day Help Island finally closed for good to be replaced by the new Welcome Islands--and the now memory-holed Community Gateways.
Prokofy wrote: "Obviously the "four tasks" orientation that even gave a few Linden dollars just wasn't working. People lost patience with it. I ran through it a few times myself to test it and found that the HUD simply wouldn't load, or stuff wouldn't happen as it was supposed to."
I remember when I first tried it as with an alt. I was disappointed. There were some really good ideas in there, but they were buried under a mass of distractions and poor user interface design.
Prokofy wrote: "I thought the talking parrot was a distraction and annoyance."
I was fond of the original OI Talking Parrot. We included a Talking Dodo with a similar script in Oxbridge as a homage to it. However, the Virtual Ability gateway blew us away with an AI-based system that you could practice using chat with.
Prokofy wrote: "I believe the deliberate screwing of newbies *was* intention not just to throttle the load on the servers, which weren't scaling very fast, but to winnow out all the feebs and choads so that only the true geeks could filter through, which his all that LL wanted. They wanted content producers and scripters -- they had a notion of developing a very attractive world first, and then selling that or leasing that in some fashion before the masses entered. They actually thought, however, that there would be more of a mass base of pure geeks than there were."
Depressing, but possible. Second Life's biggest problem has always been that Linden Lab does not understand--and seems stubbornly resistant to understanding--what their customers want out of their product.
Posted by: Carl Metropolitan | June 06, 2012 at 06:15 PM
What a raving asshole you are, Pep.
Again, you wrote, ""Pep (has done the test, and despite wanting to have a reason for malcommunication, failed to place the blame at the door of this neurological syndrome.)"
That's not a driver's test; in this context, it's an online aspie test. If it is some OTHER test, in this thread on this topic, you didn't make it clear. What more likely happened is that you forgot you wrote it, or you suffer from psychism.
There isn't any "genetic failing" of my gender to "hear what I want to hear," that's absurd. There's *you*, being an asshole, which is environmental, not genetic.
Again, what an asshole!
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | June 06, 2012 at 08:50 PM
Please point out to me, Prok, where in my post I wrote that I had done an online test? You have done your usual thing and made a fool of yourself, this time in public view, by misreading clearly stated words and adducing a meaning to them which is entirely unsubstantiated and even worse, wholly incorrect. FYI my brother is a psychiatrist (which is one of the reasons I have a considerable disregard for such medical shamans) and once upon a time (at the same time he tested me for cyrrhosis of the liver, and discovered that his own organ was in a much worse state than my overtly healthy one) he formally assessed me for autistic spectrum tendencies, his reluctantly formed conclusion being that I had multiple personality disorders when compared with the average hyperemotional unintellectual irrational man in the street, but that these disorders - including an elevated Empathic Quotient and an extreme Communications Effectiveness rating - did not aggregate to anything more than Justified Narcissistic Superiority. Pep ("You never listen to me" is the female way of saying "You don't do what I want you to"; you transparently obviously suffer from the written form of this misperception.)
Posted by: Pep | June 07, 2012 at 10:32 AM
Is it a badge of honour to have a post deleted by Prok because her illiteracy has been conclusively demonstrated.
Pep (Will consider it so.)
Posted by: Pep | June 07, 2012 at 07:49 PM
In case you missed it the first time around, here is the post that Prok deleted: - until her inferiority complex demands that she removes it again:
"Please point out to me, Prok, where in my post I wrote that I had done an online test? You have done your usual thing and made a fool of yourself, this time in public view, by misreading clearly stated words and adducing a meaning to them which is entirely unsubstantiated and even worse, wholly incorrect. FYI my brother is a psychiatrist (which is one of the reasons I have a considerable disregard for such medical shamans) and once upon a time (at the same time he tested me for cyrrhosis of the liver, and discovered that his own organ was in a much worse state than my overtly healthy one) he formally assessed me for autistic spectrum tendencies, his reluctantly formed conclusion being that I had multiple personality disorders when compared with the average hyperemotional unintellectual irrational man in the street, but that these disorders - including an elevated Empathic Quotient and an extreme Communications Effectiveness rating - did not aggregate to anything more than Justified Narcissistic Superiority. Pep ("You never listen to me" is the female way of saying "You don't do what I want you to"; you transparently obviously suffer from the written form of this misperception.)"
Posted by: Pep | June 07, 2012 at 07:54 PM
Pep - Prokofy may be many things, but illiterate is definitely not one of them. Whether you agree or otherwise with what she says on this blog and her other forums, it is quite clear that she is well educated and extremely widely read.
Accusing her of illiteracy just makes you look silly.
Posted by: Evangelical | June 09, 2012 at 10:03 PM
Um, no posts are "deleted" -- they may be caught in the spam file. You can post any old hateful thing you want here as long as you 1) use a Second Life first and last name that isn't an alt and 2) do not incite or cause damages to me or others. That leaves you LOTS of latitude!
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | June 10, 2012 at 11:12 PM
I seem to recall that Prokofy was the person who predicted - here on this blog, in fact - that SL would be dead by the end of this year.
Posted by: Marx Dudek | June 10, 2012 at 11:15 PM
Pep, you really, truly are a raving asshole!
You wrote that you had "taken the test". This was a post that mentioned people who took online tests. We all know from the context of Second Life that Torley Linden infamously took the online aspie test, decided that he was an aspie, and then annoyed everybody enormously for years and years after that telling us how he was overcoming his disability -- although it was never really properly and professionally diagnosed and could have been other issues like depression or bipolar or who the hell knows. Everyone knows that. If you are a newbie and didn't hear that story and know that part of SL lore, well, now you do.
You didn't specify what kind of test. So now...you're going to tell us that your brother's test is what was used? Laugh out loud. A brother shouldn't be doing a test on a sibling, that's unprofessional. He should give it to another doctor to do if he wishes to be impartial. So that's hardly any better than an online test.
Your inane and misogynist comments are so noted -- again, you're an online asshole. Whether you come by your illnesses organically or they are Internet-induced, well, who cares?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | June 10, 2012 at 11:48 PM
what state is a zombie?;)
Posted by: c3 | June 11, 2012 at 01:12 AM