Second Thoughts

Linden Homes Survey: Are the Lindens Getting Ready to Compete with the Rentals Market Again?

The Lindens have a survey out about Linden Homes that apparently has been sent to Premium members, or maybe just all Linden Home members. I have one that I converted to a site in the SL Public Land Preserve -- the wizard's castle. I like the Linden Homes concept and builds and all, it's just an unfair competition to inworld rentals businesses like mine, especially those that cater more to the low-end market and newbies. It's also competition to prefab builders for newbie lots, as the homes come with them.

The competition issue with these Lindens Homes (Coconut calls them "Linden Assisted Living" -- although she claims I called them that first) -- has been hashed to death and debated on all the forums and nobody seems to have been able to make a dent in what the Lindens are doing with it. On the face of it, I think anything that gets people easily inworld and owning land and thinking about their property with a sense of pride and privacy, which leads them to "settle in" and make the world more stable with friends and activities, and make the economy better with purchases, is all a good thing.

The Lindens seemed to get thousands and thousands of signups -- was it 50,000 or more? -- or at least get a lot of existing customers to use their free 512 with the premium up on a Linden Home, like me, or else buy the premium just to get the home -- and of course the free gifts and the nice, clean low-lag premium sandboxes.

Some people have bitched about the house selection or lack of control, but really, the house selection is about as good as it gets, for what it is, and you get more prims than you would owning a 512 outright due to the Lindens' easement plans and building strategies rooting the builds elsewhere to give you double prims.

So now the question on the surveys is this: what else do you want? I'm nervous about them a) tinkering with a good thing that seems to work (unless sales are off) and b) tinkering with it to become even MORE competitive with the rentals market, but there really is no pathway to expressing this dissent anymore. Unless I missed the memo, I don't think there is a "community" Linden for the Mainland anymore. That is, I realize that there is some kind of Linden now who I think deals with Nautilus but I haven't heard of inworld meetings or seen a blog. Maybe "those who know, know". I wrote to a few of those new community Lindens about the infohubs and never heard back except to get some boilerplate emails to apply to be in Destination, which wasn't exactly my point, since some but not all are already in Destination.

The questions on the survey ran like this -- would you like to have more control over your parcel? (what would that mean, exactly/)? Would you like to be able to remove the house and place your own? Would you like larger lots? More prims? Would you like social get-togethers?

I found myself saying "no" to all the suggestions about removing houses and making bigger lots so that at least some dissenting vote goes in to their plan to compete even more with the rentals business. One has to defend one's interests. Whatever happened to the idea that they were going to have land owners have advertising in the Linden Homes common areas for people ready to graduate up? I don't think anything like that was ever done. On the splash page for the land buying on the secondlife.com site, there are suggestions that you can buy a sim or rent an island but not rent mainland. That's often what happens. Because the Lindens don't really get anything out of people renting out mainland, especially, except one less person abandoning land. Kind of a negative. (BTW, if you think that everybody is "fleeing to the open sims," I just read somewhere that Open Sim is deleting 50 percent of their regions for non-use. We continue to keep finding out that virtuality is an acquired taste.)

I did check off "yes" to the proposition that the Lindens should hold more social occasions. I don't know why I think that's a good thing, but I think it is. There really isn't anybody in the Linden Homes set that can convene those sorts of neighbourhood barbecues, it doesn't look like any "Linden Homes Owners" groups ever got started, the way they did in Nautilus or Bayside (socialism kills civil society). While the prospect of hovering on an overcrowded sim of fellow elf-home lovers may seem a bit dismal, why not? It could be fun. The Lindens should have premium gift-givers that only go with Linden Homes, too, to sweet that pot.

The last premium gift was a bust for me because it came in mesh, so it was like some big giant blob. I did like the ones before that by Coleen Desmoulins, there was a nice bowl and lamp I put in my home -- not my Linden Home but my *real* home, so to speak, in Refugio.

Just because the Lindens do a survey doesn't mean they're actually going to do anything or change anything, but I do think somehow we should raise with them the issue again of the pathway from the Linden Homes to island rentals. Shouldn't they care about that, too?

 

 

Where We Are on OS

I'm going to make a few pronouncements -- well, if I'm wrong, shoot me:

1. The Revolution of 1776 has fizzled with now only about 3728 votes -- a fraction of the owners of some 25,000 islands , is faltering, and has failed. Like the poor Mensheviks and the Kadety, who had a pretty good thing going, they're going to get clobbered by the Bolsheviks, whose "Bol'shoi" has nothing to do with their actual numbers, which are less, or their popularity, which is less, but everything to do with their radical zealotry and their German financing : )

2. The Lindens will not be changing their prices. Not. changing. their. prices. Read my unmoveable avatar non-lips. They've given plenty of warning. They've given plenty of justification. And this will not change. They need to raise the price because a) they are not here to help you rent land and want to be making the profit, not you and b) it's costing them more in resources and people. That's all.

3. The best we can hope to extract from them is a waiving of the re-conversion fee for those people who converted to 4 OS sims from a full-prims sim. That's of course the right thing to do.

4. There will be a vast, stupid, divisive, ridiculous, and retarded debate by both Lindens and residents about "performance issues". All the idiots on the OS sims will try to prove they are light users and their sim has no problem. The Lindens will look earnest and suck their thumbs in concentration and promise to work on making a light-sim product with, say, 1875 prims and throttles as to agents and script usage...and not make one. It's not practical for them to meter usage or assess usage in real time on real people by real people. It is much more practical simply to raise the product price for all. That's what they are doing.

5. Some people will abandon their sims, but most will convert back, or sell them to be converted back, or soldier on with the higher payment. There will be no big outflux from SL, there never is.

6. Watch this space, in six months, they will have the class 6 and they will then crash prices on either 5 or 6 or both lol.

Magellan's Moth and Dolphin Continents Linked

I found a lantern in Nautilus with the same moths flitting around it as used to be in the Moth Continent at the Temple of Iris.

The lanterns are strewn around the new continent of Nautilus, which seems to have been a civilization of dolphins, except I have no idea how those dolphins were able to drag big blocks of stone up out of the rivers, build canals, and fashion gold statues. But maybe they pressed some other lesser race into serve as slaves (moles?).

You may recall the Evil Lindens removed the lanterns and moths that came out every night at 7:48 pm SLT in the Atoll Continent (Hetero-etcera) and flew around the light. While the Iris temple Linden land still says "as a moth drawn to the flame..." the moths were all removed -- God knows why. Evil Lindens probably thought they were laggy or somebody complained about them. I used to have them at Waved, a few sims away from the Iris temple.

Through the sacred rites of Sacraria, the group I formed to preserve the Ways of the Moth Temple, which Xenon Linden even joined back in the day, I was able to get one lantern that I put up in the build Jessica Ornitz did in Iris to make the infohub. Sadly, the moths didn't come out at 7:48 pm. But one day clicking on edit, I saw that inside the object was another prim titled "Moths". I took it out, and the moths flew immediately around the lantern -- but permanently, not just once a day. You can go see it there in Iris. If I tried to put the moths in any other lantern that wasn't that special one, they simply disappeared.

So somehow, they were brought to the new continent.

Here I am on Nautilus, flying around, looking at Thugs' Life, and the usual Banality of Sims. The land is flipping faster than burgers at McDonalds. Literally land melts before my eyes, appears from TraderJohn Sousa for $57,600 -- and before I can even click on it, whoops, it's flipped magically, with no avatars in site (I think they're up in the air on helicopters? Or?) and it is now another group's.

Yes, Evil has entered our world within 48 hours of the auction sells. Kalyrra Heart and Tanaka Goodfornothing or whatever her name is, partners in crime, were flying around jeering at me. "Can't cut these up, girls," sez I -- whereupon Tanaka says, "We're so wealthy now we can buy the 1024s." With Jack's new rules, she was forced to put a more modest and not spinning sign, and the price was a healthy $79,000. I saw than Elanthius did win a few today, after his failure to snag any yesterday.

Now that I'm part of Thugs' Life myself, having bought a Nautilus parcel, I had an Evil Plan. When I saw how primmy and retarded these Lindens buildings were (headbanger ceilings, too much decoration -- a 244 house for a 468 prim plot, no privacy windows) I thought I'll defat them, and put on their privacy windows, and then sell them for $5. Except...you can't transfer or copy them, you can only buy copies off the market places. Clever!

The Fate of Slate

Look at my photo album to see a momentous historic occasion in Second Life: Khamon Fate, one of the oldest Mainland business owners, sold his Fate Gardens, home of his tree and garden business, to move to an openspace sim by the same name in the Fairchangs Continent. The old sim of Slate was among the very first sims created in early Second Life, and of course had something of a tumultuous history.

Khamon was able to sell his prized Old World land, which contained beautiful stone textures and Linden protected borders of water, road, and railroad, for an amazing $1.5 million -- an equivalent of US $5475, to Jopsy Pendragon, another oldbie FIC mainland dweller, a particles designer whose Ethereal Teal sim on Teal is now joined to neighbouring Slate (the earliest sims were named for colours).

An august group assembled of very Old World FIC, midbies like your humble correspondent, the noble dragon Talarus Luan, Guardian of the Mainland against evil Ad Farms, and newbies like Bettina Tizzy. I recognized a few other oldbies from the old forums who have long hated me : )

The event was made entirely luminous by a large ceremonial portal with a ribbon made of particles and placed between the borders of Slate and Teal. Jopsy looks to be something like Pan or an elf; Khamon of course has green hair and skin and leaves growing over him. Snoopy was there, and a girl with a laurel of flowers. I felt as if I were in Narnia...a feeling that grew as Talarus loomed and a man on a horse came clambering up the hill from Dee's farm.

Khamon still owns some land in Taber, Alice, and Samoaa if you want to contact him for more sales -- he wishes to be done with the Mainland. I tried to think of how I could personally mark this solemn event -- and couldn't think of anything but symbolically booting Khamon from the group I founded called "Mainlanders," which he was an active part, coming to meetings and demonstrations against ad farms, once even making himself into a spinning ad-farm avatar and visiting Robin Linden's office hour in protest.

NUEbies

It's hard to know whether this story is just garbled because of the way Tateru Nino has reported it, or because the Lindens have muddled things again -- or both. I find myself asking: Can the Lindens do anything right? That's going to seem very harsh and mean, but frankly, I'm forced to ask the question. We all have a stake in newbie retention, and we need at least the Lab, that goofy software company posing as a scientific institution, to find the facts, even if they won't tell us what they really are.

You know how they have these things called "double-bind studies" and the use of blinds and placebos and so on in scientific studies? So if you are going to do an "A/B" study, i.e. comparing A to, uh, B, you need to have what we might call "a surgically-clean experimental space". In order not to contaminate the batch.

Here I'll interrupt to tell you my first very stark moment of discovering this principle at my father's lab at a factory in upstate New York, where he explained that these weights and measures that had to measure very fine amounts of materials could not be touched by the human hand, and had to be handled with tweezers, because even a fingerprint weighed something. My little brother and I, goggle-eyed, staring at the brass weights, finding the temptation to handle them overwhelming, but we could hardly be allowed to screw up the entire batch. This concept of the experimenter affecting the experiment is of course called the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, and Niels Bohr also wrote about it. So what does that mean under our Laboratory conditions?

If you are going to test two venues for how they retain newbies, and you want to see if the Mentors versus Greeters doing specialized tours make a difference, then...you can't speak of "Mentors/Greeters" on the one set of islands, and still have the Mentors coming to the island sporadically, and then speak of Greeters on another set of islands. You really have to be clear on what distinguishes Mentors from Greeters, or Mentors doing this special Greeting tour. That means not having them even do their routine or haphazard rounds, which we see them doing now and then on all infohubs and welcome areas.

Furthermore -- perhaps this is just silly me, a non-scientist -- you can't ask the subjects of the experiment themselves if they think they are now retaining better in SL, or are happier -- you have to really check up on whether they retain by monitoring their log-ons, hours, and most importantly, coming back at 30- and 60-day intervals to see if they are "still there". While some of this material seems to have been gathered, it isn't clear whether anything but the newbies own self-reporting is making this determination that...as Jacek Antonelli even had to point out to Tateru...involved a whopping...3 percent difference (which could be a statistical anomaly or caused by not handling the setting and the data properly). I mean, what is the difference, really, between Mentors and Greeters? And have any of these A/B tests involved "nothing at all" versus "something with Mentors"? Surely they must have done that?

Look folks, why is this so hard? Even I, at my own very lowly and unscientific level perform this simple task:

How Can You Be Two Places At Once, When You're Not Anywhere at All?

Riding Dizzy Banjo's art installation at Burning Life.

At our last Sutherland Dam meeting, attendance was sparse, likely because I couldn't get group chat to work anywhere, and couldn't get the groups to send out messages -- usually I IM about 30 groups of mine before starting, to reach thousands of people which is usually what you have to do to get 25 to come. Oh, well. Not everyone thinks to use the events list. Last week I didn't hold the meeting due to the presidential candidate debates.

We meandered over more than the stated topic, which was supposed to be about ad farms and Burning Life, but also talked about the Orange model in SL (a RL company sponsoring inworld talent) and the annoying Beyers Sellers.

Inevitably, talk moved to "interop" because there was a meeting on it recently, but it doesn't seem as if it is "anywhere". I did read somewhere that someone in that group or in OpenSim is working on transferring content inside groups. Naturally, with groups operating across grids, you could transfer objects with that function. No one seemed concerned about permissions. And no one seemed concerned from what I gather about first fixing the obvious problems with groups -- like that chat itself can't transmit, let along objects across grids! First things first...

I'm old enough to remember Firesign Theater; on of their albums was "How Can You Be in Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All". It was weird hippie humour, and this particular song was a sort of Vaudeville type tune featuring a futuristic used car dealer named Ralph Spoilsport who drives this futuristic car with all these newfangled features down the highway.

Burnt Man

One of the cultural origins of Second Life I find particularly repugnant is Burning Man. This, of course, was a formative experience for Philip Rosedale. Why do I find it repugnant, when I am a free thinker, at least appreciative of hippies and alternative movements, and like camping outdoors and art? Because...For the life of me, I cannot see anything grand about going out into the heat on the playa and burning a tall wooden structure. It seems atavistic, destructive, and stupid. I read the Carlos Castaneda books ("The Teachings of Don Juan") when I was a teenager, I didn't find them very attractive then, and I still don't. Somehow, the notion of going out in the desert and chewing peyote and throwing up and seeing visions didn't hugely attract me in the end, although it was fascinating for a time, because there was a kind of nagging voice: "And then what? Then what do you do? And if it all has to come from following some weird, oppressive teacher and taking some toxic drugs, what do you have for yourself afterwards?" And, like other countercultural heroes of the time, Carlos seemed to end badly, with the three cultic-like followers, the women surrounding him, turning up dead or disappeared. It always had a heavily creepy feel to me.

In real life, the Burning Man people have turned into something of a counter-culture industry, since it has grown to the size of 50,000, a small village. Since they ardently hate capitalism, they haven't gone the merchandising route that served the Grateful Dead t-shirt industry and other hippie ventures so well -- they just sell coffee and ice cubes, apparently to generate the proceeds to pay this little town near the BM site whose services are obviously terribly overwhelmed when these Woodstock-type freaks descend. Now, they have to print bunches of rules, and browbeat people not to shit on the playa or hold too large dinner parties, because police do come and shut down unsanitary kitchens, and of course make drug arrests. The organizers "do not condone drugs" but one notes that...they do not condemn them, either.

People are supposed to make "art". I dunno, somehow, culminating in destroying a big wooden tower man doesn't seem like "art" to me. But I suppose people paint their bodies and dance around and get their freak on. They are practicing the "gift economy". I'll bet some are secretly taking that $5 bus into town to get cigs lol.

Anyway, whatever the intensity of the RL BM, which does indeed seem to be cult-like in its devotion, the SL version of course is very tame. In true SL fashion, it is PG, meaning no nipples can be shown, but of course, that doesn't stop residents, or Lindens from tolerating, a big BDSM display of restrained and chained people, which of course is, uh, PG lol.

And all the predictable Geek Religion, Techlib, California Ideology chimes are rung. We are to hate suburbia. We are to embrace pagan rural techno...ism. LOL. For example, the guy who made famous the Sizzle and Fizzle critiques of BM has denounced someone who put one of those big megaprim flat green prim lawns with deck chairs on the playa as essentially being the Babbitt of Burning Man lol, disgusting with his horrid suburban sensibilities (the horror!) and the good guys are people with a totally derivative cliche hobo/hillbilly house with a broke-down porch, tin cans, rabbits for sale, blah blah. I wish I had a dollar for every one of *those* uniform, rigidly conformist builds in SL. Sigh.

You know, even though the cards are stacked, and I know what it will consist of, I still fly to something like this, thinking, well, maybe there will be something.

Viewer Views

This transcript is actually from 2 weeks ago, I didn't have all its pieces. I kept crashing, and Jacek and McCabe showed up to flog their wares.

BTW, speaking of interface, I literally spent one hour or more trying to walk this person through how to teleport for events. I refuse to offer limousine service, and at any rate, it's pointless

I can't get SLURLs to work most of the time, so putting a SLURL in the chat is not an option.

Metanomics is the worst offender with this laziness -- they want you to offer them a TP. Of course, to a busy events organizer with 16 windows open talking to groups and calling cards and trying to get the word out, having to stop, do a search of that name in in the People List, then try to offer them a teleport, is just annoying and inconvenient. Half the time they are AFK and don't get it or something, then bang on you again. Or their TP button is greyed out as they aren't your friend or something (not sure how that works). So that means you have to make a new landmark and push it to them on their profile, nuisance case.

There's a very counterintuitive thing that has to happen if you try to get people to TP from the events list. They have to "just know," or else listen to you when you try to explain, that they have to UNCLICK the "in progress" mode. "In progress" is worthless. I presupposes that people sort by events "in progress" that they browse and TP to on time. But "In Progress" taps out after 5 or 10 minutes and the event *no longer displays*. It is impossible to get people to *hear this*. They think if your event *is* "In Progress" then it must show; if it does not show, you are wrong and haven't made it show.

So you explain and explain -- sort by DATE to make ALL EVENTS show up by DATE, bypassing the "In Progress" annoyance which taps out. But then people often can't seem to find the TIME on the long list or can't think to take the TITLE of your event which you just told them in the Group IM and LOOK FOR IT.

The Lindens should completely get rid of "In Progress". If someone has a need to browse the list for "what's to do at 6:00 pm," they browse it. They don't need to sort for "in progress" if they know how to tell time...

A Bunny Licensed in 5 States, Linden G-Men, and M Linden's Supply 'N Demand Comedy Hour

You don't have to worry now that the Second Life Herald has deserted SL and gone over to cover robot tentacle sex in Google's Lively, because the Lindens' own web site has been revamped these days and is providing hours of fun-filled entertainment.

Start with the forums, which, after Prok's Law was put into effect in 2005, became a very lobotomized place, but has gradually picked up speed with a new crop of wags pushing the envelope.

A guy writes in he's suddenly got "a bunny licensed in five states" landing on his property. Seems he is possibly guilty of abusing the famous Playboy trademark, and he talks out of about 4 sides of his mouth trying to prove that he is merely living out his SL as a Playboy of the Western World, not violating the mark...

I swung by the officia,l licensed, sanctioned real-life Playboy sim that had 13,350 traffic on it and no bots or campers, and about 11 dancers, more males than females. It has a store with really realistic art...oh, actually in fact those are photos of real humans next to avatars. The jackets and bling and stuff seems very well put together and quite inexpensive, imagine, a Hugh Hefner style silk smoking jacket for only $75. It was just the thing to try to reassemble my broken life from the Sims Online...I spent some of my last hours on EA-Land in my lovely black smoking jacket from TSO...too bad the Playboy one doesn't come in different colours.

And a new Gor drama that promises to perk up the SL summer doldrums with word that Gor has gone nuclear. Read on.... Better start taking your iodine pills...

The forums list of bot places is very disappointing and sort of fails to make the point, but this blog with a guy's adventures bot-hunting is a total laff riot. It seems the bots are now in-breeding (*shudders*).

Sharp-eyed readers of the official Linden site will have noticed an interesting job offer...

The World of SL and the W'ural'd of SL

What is the World of SL? Or the W'ura'ld for that matter? (Khamon, could you please spell that for me again and explain its provenance exactly, thanks). Well, for starters, you can read World of SL as a feeder, and see what you see. One of the reasons I can ask, "Hey, where are the student blogs about SL?" is because they aren't on there...and there are just occasional or annoying bloghuds that show kids sitting in pastel-coloured loungers saying "hi" from their edu sim with no other thought.

Of course, Tao may be too lazy or busy to go out and get all the other new blogs out there, and I suspect there are bunches.

Still, what do people do in SL? Well, read on World of SL -- they are doing stuff like making the Relay for Life on separate sims this year, away from the Lindens. I'm a big critic of RLF precisely because they don't integrate with the community and have residents run the relays as part of their businesses --they merely tag them to put out kiosks. The event branding is confusing because people do have their own events but they are stagged over so much time the message isn't clear. It's a good start to get away from the Linden vehicle sims, though these were still laggy. Timeless Prototype came up with an idea to drop down teleport portals like out of Star Wars to come up when sims crashed. There's something clever -- yet painful about that, adapting to sad realities.

Remember the Avatard? Well, they finally had the good sense to go on the web and not just in PDF, which may get them more mindshare. The content is just as lame, but perhaps it does appeal to a certain readership, and they are more professional and varied for what they are -- a real tabloid -- than the fake tabloid of the Herald, which is stuck on Woodbury and War in Jesse Upon Us and Furry Diaper Baby Porn etc in an unending never-varied diet (they recently tried to be funny with some Linden blog parodies in the Onion mode which only served as a painful reminder of how bad they are most of the rest of the time.

or -- remember that site CNN started? It's still kicking. There's a lead story today about economic pressures closing the surfing sims -- very good coverage of an issue many may not follow, the attempt to actually create a surfing community and monetarize it like the attempt to make a sailing community, and the realization -- that Rezzable of course is so resistant to! -- that only rentals and stores with content - and did I say rentals? -- work as viable models in SL due to Mainland Mystery Math which...affects the Private Islands too, only less so as in the past their purchase prices were less and their occupancy was higher and their revenue higher. Watch this space: I predict Rezzable will go into some high-end townhouse arty rentals community before they go bust.