Mistyque - Shopping for the Elite

Last week, wandering about, I discovered the strangest thing I have seen in a long time. A shop - a large complex of shops - into which I cannot enter because I have the “Wrong Access Level”. Apparently the Lindens I earn in my own shop are not good enough for owner Misty Rhodes.
Rhodes, member of the Original Live Helpers and an SL Mentor, writes in her profile that she loves the ‘limitless talent and creativity’ of the people of SL. And yet te shop - the shop! - cannot be accessed by people with No Payment Info on File.

Let’s go back again and have a look around in the sim of Limantour and it’s surroundings. Maybe it is a heavily populated area with lots of traffic from griefers?

Surprisingly the teleport lands me right at the door of “Misty and Reve’s Home” opposite the shop. I have access here, apparently. Limantour is an empty spot at this late hour (0:28 AM PST, 9:28 AM for me in Holland) and I can’t discover any crowd pulling venues in the surroundings. The mini-sandbox in Montara - adjacent to the shop - is empty and the rest of the sims surrounding Limantour are typical of the messy residential / shopping areas on the Mainland. Lifeless is the word. Nobody to grief, even if I wanted to. In Guala I have to navigate inbetween more No Entry barriers. An empty land of walled communities; desolate, unimaginative and boring.

Limitless talent and creativity. I have a shop and I make clothing, so I suppose she is talking about me as well. I am not sure if she means herself - her creativity is hidden behind the oh so familiar red NO ENTRY tapes. Makes you wonder what terrible things happened here in the past, when the unregistered crowd first started to flock to this Promised Land of suburban nastiness. And where they are now.

Miss Rhodes is yet to answer my IM - maybe she is busy, maybe she is never online anymore since the griefer terror struck her shop, and maybe she pulled my profile and decided that questions from a No Payment Info person are not worth answering. I guess we’ll never know. But I know one thing. When the ban is lifted, either by me registering through my as yet nonexistent credit card, or by her, I am not going to shop at Mistyque.

You know the Blue Screen of Death from your Windows machine -meet the Blue Tab of Death from Second Life.

Mistyque, Limantour 39,206,60

Two Avis versus Big Business

I guess it is a matter of taste, mostly. And I must admit that when I first got into SL I was very impressed by the way SL car companies recreated real life vehicles for their SL clients. I guess you know the sunny roadside lots with the Mercs and the Beemers and the Humvees… I kept floating around them. One of these days…
Recently I had enough money to buy my own car and from a picture on the SL Exchange I fell in love with the Warf Ventura Baja - a car unique to SL, not a ‘textured box’.

Today I ventured out to the Nissan test track for some road testing: the Warf Ventura versus the free Nissan Sentra, available on site.
Both have their pluses and minuses. The Warf Ventura, in first of five gears, is so powerful that it becomes hard to handle sometimes. But the Nissan has less precise steering, which makes for an equally problematic manoeuvrability. The Warf Ventura has a hover mode, but the Sentra sports open doors. The Nissan has a full dash and interior, but the Warf Ventura looks good from every angle - textured cars have a lot of angles from which they look quite bad - and reacts to SL light conditions.
Five (Warf Ventura) or six (Nissan) gears doesn’t matter much - at those speeds you’ll be crashing through sim borders in seconds flat. It all comes down to looks, and for me the Warf Ventura wins hands down.

The Nissan is suburbia in optima forma - dull and boring and middle-of-the-road. A safe choice for middle management but you are not going to pick up any hot dates in it.

The Warf Ventura sounds better, looks better, feels better and it’s 100% Second Life. The avis have beaten Nissan at their own game. But, granted, Nissan laid down a great test track!

Nissan, Nissan (26, 126, 26)
Warf Ventura, Motorati (216, 216, 29

Showdown at Nissan… home match for the blue car.

Did I say ‘blue’ car? Both cars have color change options.

Power versus respectability - but who needs respectability in SL?

Parting shot… try that, Jeremy Clarkson, without renting a chopper!

 

How Deep Does Linden Lab Want the Doo-doo to Be?

I am quite sure that they didn’t really think of it at all. Which is painful enough in itself. Or maybe they were afraid to enter into blatant stereotyping, which is indeed a risk, but one which is unavoidable anyway, as soon as you start creating lifelike avatars. But somebody needs to wake up at Linden Lab before all kinds of minority pressure groups start crying havoc.

This past weekend I tried the whole new citizen song and dance again (no, dear Lindens, I did not go as far as to actually create this illegal second avi) and discovered how the potential new Resident gets a choice of twelve styles of standard avatar. Six male, six female. Two furries and ten humans. Ten white humans.

I know enough about American politics and popular culture to see the stink which is looming on the horizon. On this blog I can safely write about it (who the heck is reading anyway?) but as soon as the Sharptons of this world get a hold of the issue, it’s going to hit the fan big time. ‘Look, Linden Lab gives you the choice to be either white or an animal!‘ That is going to make one powerful quote, one hundred percent irrefutable, albeit unintentionally so, I hope.

Of course, in-world you can be anything you like. But that takes time and fiddling with settings some find very hard to get right. Linden Lab really needs to offer some more than 5×2 white characters and two furries. And fast.

The current (25/02/07) choice of avatars for new SL Residents. (Screenshot from the Second Life website)

Griefers

How many times have you been caged today? Whenever I leave the sanctuary of our beloved Mariposa sim, I get caged at least once (all cagers can count upon being reported through the ‘report abuse’ tab that appears when right-clicking the cage). It is a nuisance, nothing more, but a big one if you are in a sandbox or just checking some of the beauty of SL (The fascinating airfield at Abbotts, for example, next to a busy sandbox, is one of those ’spillover’ areas with lots of griefers).

When I was a noob, about a hundred days ago, I collected freebies like mad. Weapons, genitalia (this girl owned a genuine oversized dick!), noises - in other words, ready-made griefer products. It is up to the newbie to decide what to do with them, and it is evident that a good deal of them make the wrong decision.

Whereas I can see that banning weapons is not going to happen - and rightfully so - it could be a good idea to make free distribution of weapons and other griefer tools a Terms of Service violation. Give our new citizens clothing, houses, cars, plants and what have you - but not guns or genitalia. These items are for sale, meaning that No Payment Info people can’t get at them until they have spent some time in-world to collect funds, after which most would probably have lost their urge to cause grief, or have come to understand that what they cause is not fun but grief.

In the whole discussion about lag, griefers, No Payment Infos, I miss - as is usual in many western societies today - any feeling of responsibility. Those who spread the stuff, are also responsible. Stop pointing at a large and diverse group like ‘the NPIs’ (yours truly is one) and start looking around you more. It is all too easy to just blame a group as a whole and then think you’re done with it.

In real life that’s called bigotry.

What? Another Second Life blog?

ehh… yes. I can’t deny it.