Second Thoughts

Forced Relocation

Anshe Chung is doing a pretty nasty and shitty thing -- in part out of spite, for which she/he is known, in part, out of economic necessity, which isn't pretty. I figured I could expect some retaliation for my criticism of Anshe Chung -- and I wasn't wrong.

The other day I get a notecard from one of the ever-changing ACS workers that in an effort to improve our Second Lives (har har, they pick up this kind of bullshit from the Lindens), we were now going to be forcibly relocated from our homes. Our existing home, on A'ksha Oasis, on a parcel with mountain, desert, and waterfront all in one -- quite unique -- bought more than three years ago, in June 2005, was to be forcibly moved to a neighbouring sim, whose name, A'ksha Mesa, sums up the problem: we were being moved from a beautiful mountain to a flatlands with textures nowhere as unique, and with no terraforming that was unique, as in A'ksha. (Customers are not allowed to terraform.)

Why? Well, there wasn't an immediately obvious reason at all, but I think the way it is being justified (so as not to look as if it is outright retaliation, which of course it is) is that the sims need to be "consolidated". After a neighbour moved out, a huge parcel on the sim went up for sale, at the usual high ACS price (other private islands have moved to $1/m sales, or even $0/sales, with merely tier up front, let's say. Not ACS, which collects both a hefty sale price AND the tier up front, and charges top dollar for the tier, too. I was paying US $29 tier to hold 5120 m2.

Meanwhile, on this A'ksha Mesa, virtually the entire sim, divided up into about 6 parcels, was for sale, covered in yellow, and had been in yellow for ages. So there's the problem: two neighbouring sims, formerly a beautifully landscaped area of some 4 or 6 desert sims making up a fabulous landscape, that simply can't sell. It always had a very hard time selling, because people are afraid of hills; they are afraid their tacky prefabs can't fit on them, they can't figure out how to build or place a house, so they shy away from them. They want flat pancakes where the house instantly fits. Sad, but there it is.

So in order to solve the yellow problem which was dragging on for months, ACS decided to turn two sims into one, dumping off the few people left in the one on to the other. In order to get rid of more yellow, ACS said they'd offer people to acquire more land on that new sim for $0/m cost (as a special favour to offset the sudden forced relocations with 2 weeks notice, although $0/m sale is the NORM on most other islands these days), but of course, paying the higher tier. There was no offer to terraform roughly the equivalent sim. Given that A'ksha had flatlands on it, there was no offer to move the one person on flat A'ksha Mesa over to the flat land of A'ksha; instead, the mountain dwellers of A'ksha Oasis (I have 4 people in the group now) were the ones to be shaken loose.

And there was no offer not to have any relocation at all, but to acquire the land on the sim for $0 to solve the problem, to work together to solve the sales problem. $0/m sale land on that sim probably would have cleaned up the yellow -- I personally would pay tier, but won't pay $61,000 Lindens to buy land.

Time for New Pics?

One Big Step for Script Kiddie, One Giant Leap to Cornfield?

Photo by Nimrod Yaffle from Clickable Culture.

I heard a delicious rumour that I hasten to publish in the hope that, as Uri used to say at the Herald, "the true story will come out in the comments".

Apparently Gareth Nelson, the nuisance case here on my blog nipping at my heels 10 times a day, got into some hot water with the Lindens. Could it be that Gareth is sitting on the tractor as we speak, watching that bad boys reform movie cycle endlessly in the twilight, waiting for the Children of the Damned to come out and zombify him?

I had a strange IM from Garrulous Gareth the other day which I studiously ignored. He said he was going to try this new teleport experiment, where he was going to try to go from his opensim-like thing, which has a name like Lite Sim, over to real Second Life, or was it visa versa? Does this thing run only in one direction?

He wrote something like: although it seemed counterintuitive, and you'd think I'd be the last person to come on this junket, he wanted me to come on this TP with him. It sounded like trouble to me, and finding that Gareth is a total tar baby, I wanted NOTHING to do with it. I ignored him.

Come to find out tonight that the scuttle in the AWGroupies is that Gareth got in trouble for somehow accessing agni. Now agni, for those of you never follow the tech talk, is the name of the Lindens' main server. If you look up at the top of your game screen, and pull down HELP and pick ABOUT SECOND LIFE you will find a URL for your own server location with "agni.com" as part of the address. So that's where all the inventory and whatnot is held.

It seems that somehow, Gareth got access to this agni during his TP misadventures, and got a look-see into the entire world's inventory and chat. Yes, your inventory and chat. Apparently this was a "read only" kind of thing, but still spooky to the Lindens.

Now, what will happen to Gareth? Probably nothing. We know how the Lindens love their gimps, said my source, far less politically-correct than I. Yes, the aspies in SL are always "high-functioning" just like all the children are above average in Lake Wobegone.

You know, I always said that once you punch a whole in this thing, the stuff will leak out. Just doing all this interop stuff, and letting goofs like Gareth near it, you will definitely put the world at risk. We saw this time and again with the way LL libsecondlife run around and griefed people as they fabulously found bugs and reverse-engineered. (BTW, they've renamed themselves now due to the "in SL" trademark thing, forget what they call themselves now but I think it's "virtual" something).

Well, what do you make of all this? And what do you know?

Useless Nits of SL Hijacking Keywords and Making Black PR Picks

You'll never cease to marvel at the useless, petty nits of Second Life. People have time on their hands to fulfill their dreams of petty vengeance, and SL provides a rich substrate.

I'll catch up on the last few annoyances by focusing on this topic: people who misuse search terms, or rather, to put it more bluntly, who hijack search terms just to show up in search, hijacking traffic using your avatar or company name. This is of course low-life trash behaviour, such as HIPPOS inventor did for a time.

The other day, I have the following annoying conversation with such a nit:

Darkrose Skytower: (Saved Tue Aug 19 20:28:41 2008) hi there, i was on straits of asia yesterday as i was interested in the land.one of your group memebers killed me and sent me home without so much as to ask why I was there. I am very disappointed by the person's treatment. Please do advice yr members to treat others with less hostitiy especially if you want to rent/sell.
Prokofy Neva: Uh, stop being a total entitlement-happy ass. This land is not in search, it is not offered for rent, because it is TAKEN. There aren't any rentals available, so the tenant there has every right to eject you, you were obviously bothering them. I'm not obliged to do a single thing for you just because you try to grab a sim already taken, that's absurd.
Prokofy Neva: I don't put up red ban lines because they aren't allowed in Dreamland, but if my tenant wishes to eject a trespasser, that's their right, your insistence that somebody h as to accommodate you is totally absurd.
Prokofy Neva: WTF are you even in my group for? are you mad? There is no rental offered there, no ad, nothinhg in search, why are you even there? it's ridiculous
Darkrose Skytower: 1) your land is in search. that was how i found u. 2) It is STATED in YR LAND that it is for rent. THAT WAS WHY I WENT THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE! Your answer is more absurd and unreasonable than your tenents . Thanks you very much for your stupitity.
Prokofy Neva: 1) it is not in search, don't be an ass, Straits of Asia is NOT in search. You must be mixing it up with the next sim over
Prokofy Neva: 2) it is not for rent, Straits of Asia is NOT in search and NOT for rent
Prokofy Neva: 3) you are a total ass
Prokofy Neva: It's TAKEN DUN
Prokofy Neva: Straits of Asia is NOT in search, I double checked. It's not in classifeds or search, and hasn't been for ages, so you have no call to go there
Prokofy Neva: the next sim over has one small townhouse available, but that doesn't mean you get to fly into the next sim and bother people and act all pissy if somebody ejects you, seriously, get a life

Crime, Corruption, and Conspiracy Harm the Economy

Intlibber Brautigan, Second Life's resident goofy Libertarian and Extropianist extremist, seems to be on another ideological jihad these days, using the Herald as his bully pulpit, or should I say bully *puppet* as the Herald has abandoned all pretext of independence these days (does Intblubber buy ads, I wonder, or donate to the uh, SLH pension fund?). Int even parachuted into our dam meeting last Friday to declare me a "PTA fascist," which is what he calls anybody who references the rule of law or civilization norms to bring about civil society.

Pixeleen has also been filing faux ACLU-style rants about the State's "deathsquads" and overuse of force on terrorists -- by which he means Harry Linden's banning of Tizzers alts, and a few other Tizzers-named accounts that Pixeleen himself and Intlibber himself made to taunt the Lindens. It's good the Lindens have been dropping this really ridiculously overdone concept of "each account must be treated as innocent until proven guilty," since surely the formation of the first zillion Tizzers or other b/tard griefer accounts (like "Comrade Morpork") that instantly join griefer groups and join my groups and harass my tenants, should have shown them by now that when you have enough offenses accumulated, you do have "probable cause" for an arrest. I'm the first to jokingly accuse the Lindens of making "executions at dawn" -- because they don't create a transparent police blotter to explain and justify their actions -- which I believe they should do. But it really is rather overblown to call the actions of a game company terminating a patron's account for griefing "like a death squad" eh? I guess Intlibber and Pixeleen have never seen a picture of their colleagues killed by death squads in RL, their arms cut off and crossed raggedly on their chest holding a propaganda sign, or gunned down in the doorways as their horrified children look on, or...they'd understand the difference. Oh well, I know they're hopeless.

What's completely preposterous -- as in "tell a Big Lie baldly and repeatedly enough and people will believe it" -- about both Intblub and the Horrid Herald is that they've extrapolated this completely justifiable and normal action against the griefing "Tizzers" into a totally overblown claim that "repression is harming the economy" and fabricated versions of what goes on behind the scene in Linden councils. Of course, the closed nature of our society and our one-party rule here are primarily at fault for this sort of hysterical ranting, because no one *can* know what the Lindens are doing or thinking *really* (and a lot of them don't even know themselves, sometimes because they make it up as they go along). "Hi, I can't take your call right now as Intlibber has accused me of a conspiracy to slay furries and ruin the land market and I'm trying to make up what I do think about these topics. Please leave your name and a detailed message."

So, down the counterpropaganda list we go:

Why The Kids Aren't Alright

Awhile ago, I asked a question on Twitter or some place, if there really are all these thriving, viable universities and colleges in Second Life -- hundreds of them, from the looks of it -- why aren't there any students' blogs? Why isn't the blogosphere as full of college people writing on Second Life as they are writing on Obama or tech or literature? Not to say that the blogosphere seems *that* filled with the college types, but still, there are plenty more than in SL, which is...0. Or maybe 1 or 2 I haven't heard of. What's up?

The only time any of us ever see anything from a college is when these nerd-packs excessively BLOG-Hud to WorldofSl these snaps of themselves sitting in pastel-coloured Adirondacks chairs, with never a thought expressed, not even how hung-over or horny they are (and of course, if they were good little SLers, they should be *neither* if they use SL regularly! Here we are now! Entertain us!

I suspect that what it's all about is just boredom. That SL isn't really cool. That it feels assigned, like a math worksheet. That it's like the Rotary Club or JV or the AV Club used to be to us -- only for a few very obsessed who probably couldn't get a date.

Last week during the Sutherland Dam discussion, I asked about universities, because I'm not quite buying the hype, and I then started looking up all their islands. There were no green dots -- or maybe one or two. I did find one with some couples, but I can't be sure, as Jerry Paffendorf once discovered logging on to the very low-traffic Democracy Island, that it wasn't a pair of furries mating on an empty sim. "It's Friday night!" somebody complained. How could I expect college kids to be on a sim? OK, but then...look at the traffic. The traffic is 10, 200, 300, never more -- often more like 10. That means nobody came Thursday, either, all day. OK, it's summer! Somebody else complains. OK, well, uh, let's check again in a few weeks then, but I think there's more to it.

I really do think it has to do with SL being too boring for young people who are more likely to have their romantic relationships in real life, they're at that age, and too boring for people who aren't ready to start the challenges of running a business. For those that might find it thrilling at first, there are too many obstacles -- camping and bots and ad farms suck all the fun out of trying to be competitive because it's unfair; a whole island is still a pretty high cost and the tier pretty steep to try to make back in sales.

Confirmation of my "boredom" theory in fact comes from one of Prof. Robert Bloomfield's students, AJ Tan.

Shaun Not Only Goes Goon, But Takes Up Ad-Farm Extortionism

Shaun Altman is now combining his sharp business practices of old, his youthful insolence and tendency toward gooning and cynical griefing, his dubious stock market "tips", and now has completely gone over to the dark side with blatant ad-farming extortion. He's bought an overpriced piece of land near my rentals, where Woodbury's have already purchased and been harassing me off and on for months, and chopped it up to 16 m2 pieces, each for $1999, and with a note urging everyone to come "do whatever" on land near Prokofy.

I think it's a test of the Linden's resolve, really. Shaun is an SL Mentor, and scripted the balloon tour in the Linden Village. He's a member of the prestigious SL Views, having been brought all-expense paid to the Lab to impart his NDA'd thoughts to the Scientists. And now this. Shaun is long-time, old-money FIC, having run off with at least $2 million Lindens of one leading content creator who is happy to explain why you shouldn't be investing with the Fox. And possibly more -- Shaun "ransomed" Ginko bonds, remember?

I'm actually not surprised Shaun has gone in for land griefing and extortion because ages ago, before there were bots or ad farms, I witnessed my first baron cut-up when Shaun TP'd me to an old sim waterfront that he couldn't seem to sell (he would never lower his prices). So he thought he'd "help it sell" but writing LAND GRAB! on it and cutting parcel into 16 m2 bits. Land scanners, opportunists, and thrill-seekers arrived by the droves, and soon the waterfront looked like your grandmother's quilt. Yes, uh cutting up land "helps it sell"; that was the original "eureka" that encouraged ad-farming -- you could "help it sell" more by not only cutting, but putting up ugly spinning bright towers and putting a huge price tag on it.

At $1999 per 16 m2, and with a glut of such ad farms all over, I'm not sure Shaun's latest escapade will "sell," but it already "sold" (or was given) to another fellow Woodbury University griefer, Scout Detritus, he of the Refrigerator of Ravenglass, who added a toilet plunger to his new micro-home to help freshen the view. Har har.

Over on his blog, Shaun is going wild trying to counter all my counter-propaganda of his lies, which is funny to watch. As a fellow goon pointed out, Shaun's saying "Second Life is serious business," sort of overplayed his hand there lol.

Shaun Altman's Further Descent into Goonery

After I published the news of another round of b/tard griefing and countered an article even in the New York Times, it wasn't long before I had to wait for a fresh attack -- this one by Shaun Altman, a former land baron and sometime SL stock exchange artist, now a member of the Woodbury griefing group with whom he has long cooperated, and chad Statosky, a long-time griefer who caused me serious damages at Ravenglass with repeatedly griefing-staged "officer recalls" in my group under the old tools. These two provocatively rented at Ravenglass in order to stage an incident and write with feigned "outrage" at being subjected to a "scam" at Ravenglass. Naturally Timeless Prototype, another long-time neuralgic grudge-holder, has chimed in with this and is sending me emails threatening to "tell all" about my "scams" on his blog lol. Shaun has published a faux-outraged blog about my nefarious business practices lol. Sigh. It follows an attempt to smear me in the past merely for combatting the Woodbury b/tards, and I guess is an indication that college couldn't start soon enough, eh?

Of course, as my thousands of customers know, I don't scam people. They are always eligible for refunds. If they break the rules, the get a notice, and they get kicked. Woodbury goons on griefing expeditions are not entitled to rent at Ravenglass, after the years of hideous attacks and financial losses they have caused me. Hazim Gazov/Tizzers Foxchase and company on their various alts would occasionally provocatively rent the very same house over and over again on Ravenglass, then go through a feigned ritual of being "outraged customers" when I refused to refund them for their griefing expedition. In the same way, neither chad Statosky, who was warned to stay away from me repeatedly when he began harassing me again this week, and yet provocatively came to rent in Ravenglass, nor Shaun Altman, who did the same thing, are going to be getting any refunds. Ever. Let it be tiny compensation for the losses both have caused me in the past, and let it again be a lesson: no, you don't get a refund from a fake provocative "rental" disguising a griefing expedition in Ravenglass. Piss off.

Although I occasionally had cause to have some serious questions about Shaun's financial dealings in SL from some very up-close-and-personal sort of experiences, I remained a friend of Shaun's and generally appreciative of his wit in SL for a number of years. I even commissioned this blue-haired fox for the job of scripting a Ravenglass rentals rentomatic box, for which I paid him an excellent price at the time, and then proceeded to struggle with him for a year after trying to get him to fix various unfortunate annoyances in it, which he did in part finally. At some point, after SLCC last year, receiving increasingly alarming reports from people I trust about the loss of their funds in his various schemes, I simply decided to stop talking to him -- I really found it awkward to deal with someone who had demonstratively taken on the task of "saving" Ginko and buying a lot of its devalued stock, only to dwindle away in mystery and never make good on his plans of salvation.

I then acquired another serious reason to defriend Shaun Altman -- increasingly, a young griefer-oriented furry himself -- he began to hang out with Woodbury University and its posse and take part in active griefing escapades against me, which were "just for kicks". I found this really infantile behaviour, but I guess Shaun has run out of positive things to do in SL, has become frustrated with the platform, and now just decided to grief. He joined in with the hugely discredited MC Fizgig operation to buy land right next door to me in Ravenglass in order to have a base to directly taunt me from and constantly have a "safe area" to flee to. Shaun proceeded to make a hugely and knowingly false post about me, claiming I engineered the seizure of this land from Fizgig due to my ostensible FIC connections (*snort*), when all I did was assiduously abuse-report these goons in order to establish the record and get the Lindens to see what this entire provocative exercise was all about, and they took appropriate action. I also reached the supervisors of the real Woodbury University in real life effectively, and for a time they really exercised oversight over these chronic griefers as there was quite a turnaround for a time. But naturally they bore a grudge.

"So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World"

Acts of kindness and consideration are so rare in Second Life, nastiness so often abounds, that when it occurs, you have to really give a shout out. And this act of kindness is all the more highlighted by the act of malice which it sought to undo. The hero of the hour is Clubside Granville -- and not for the first time!

Some of you may remember how FlipperPA Peregrine, a long-time nemesis, became a nemesis on the premises by buying or getting somehow a plot of land on Ravenglass, my flagship mainland sim for which my rentals company was named. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but some old FICy friend of his who didn't like me or bore a grudge gave it to him, or he got ahold of it somehow -- Siggy Romulus was also involved in getting a 16 m nuisance plot (that is now owned by Weedy Herbst for her "private business" involving scraping data from other people's sims -- not sure what that's all about). These parcels were in the back of the sim towards the road, near the end of the public commons.

Like the Refrigerator of Ravenglass, another nasty piece of work put in to annoy me deliberately by Scout Detritus -- who, by the way, is now visible in the Woodbury group (no surprise there!) or even the punk store that became able to blight the largely residential waterfront (barring the Gorean medicine store refrigerator) -- again, because some old FIC type with a grudge sold or gave it to annoy -- this FlipperPAY parcel was deliberately provocative. I gritted my teeth and waited to see what they'd put up, as there were frequent threats on the forums that a washing machine was needed to match the refrigerator, etc.

I never really understood what content Flipper actually *makes* in SL, do you? I know he had this sim Indigo near the GNUbie store; he used to distributed Freeview, that awful cumbersome TV that drives everyone nuts (and still does!), and maybe he had widgets or animations, not sure. Of course his lovely wife, the lovely Jenny-fur, sells bikinis or thongs or silks or something -- at one point we learned why her store comes up so high in SL Boutique search -- Sheep were instructed to code the search so it worked that way lol -- did it work that way on the Sheep viewer, too?

At any rate, Flipper sort of knocked together a boxy, conventionally textured store, left it half-finished, and never put anything for sale in it. He pretended he had come to the area because it was a nice sales area. Of course, since it's largely residential and isn't a commercial sim with high traffic, that was totally fake, although a bit farther down the road, there is a nice stretch over 3 sims of stores along the lane that do pretty well and make a nice and pleasant shopping area precisely because it has no bots or camping or junk -- I don't allow it.

At any rate, finally FlipperPAY puts this land for sale at some outrageous price, during the height of all the land extortion -- it was like $300,000 if I recall correctly, or perhaps it was dropped at one point to $100,000, but that would of course be a ridiculous price even under the old land market for a 1536, whch at most, in an established sim with a "name" would likely be about $38,400 or $25/m -- so it was some 3 times what it really could sell for -- deliberately, so as to annoy. I recall at one point doing the math to see the US dollar price, and it would have cost me like $350 or $400 US to blow FlipperPAY out of the sim and remove the threat of Cytherea or worse buying the parcel, or simply getting it in a swap -- but there was no way I felt I had to enrich FlipperPA for that amount.

Second Citizen Successor Spyware?

What's up with this?

When you go to www.gridgrind.com, Google gives you a message that this site is unsafe for your computer.

And not just due to one of those "safe certificate" issues, but because it has an actual documented history of putting malware on the site that can get into your computer.

Now why would it be doing that?

Several times I've suffered key-loggers being put on my computer, I figure by some SL-related entity, and I've often wondered how they were able to do this.

I've long forgotten to look at Grid Grind because it seemed to be just really rewarmed stuff. Anybody else?