Burning Freedom

The Second Life Insider today made me drop my jaw. Read it here and don’t forget the follow-up. The short version: the Burning Life event sported a nude statue with a marble texture in a PG sim and Linden Lab stepped in to have it censored. Result - statue ruined while being moved to a ‘more appropriate’ spot.

Forget Lolita. Forget being unable to call yourself Massimo because there’s ass in that name (and forget that my fellow Mentors and me have recently run into the work of a griefer named KikeSpicNigger, which apparently is possible) and forget the whole song and dance about broadly offensive. This one takes the cake, with a cherry on top.

I am actually lost for words here. The level of insanity simply defies description. Do I really have to explain in here what the differences are between art and porn, or between nudity and porn? Do I have to somehow explain with examples why only the most overzealous, dangerously extremist religious fringe groups would object to an artistic, non-sexual representation of the female body?

Nudity is our natural state. The human body is not offensive - it’s nature, it’s God’s creation according to some. Nudity does not hurt the tender souls of little kids - it just hurts adults who fear the freedom nudity implies. Nudity does not equal sex or porn. The flipping Vatican, that temple of backwards religious ideology filled with men and women who shy away from sex as if it were the plague, is filled with nude art.

Now really, I have no leaverage at all at Linden Lab. But hell, here goes: I demand an official apology on the Second Life blog, containing the words overzealous, overstepped, clear and boundary. I demand that the statue be allowed to stand on the intended spot, in her full nude glory, with a notecard giver next to it to give out the full text of said blog.

What the fuck were you people thinking.

Update from the Burning Life blog:

[10:10]  Iridium Linden: Hi GavinLeigh. Thanks for your note. I did tell Vicero that bits (ex:  nipples) could not be shown in a PG sim. Perhaps we can reassign your  plot to a Mature Burning Life sim. I’ll investigate and get back to you.  Or perhaps you can make the breast without so much detail. I know that’s  a lot to ask, but let’s see if we can find an alternative first.

NippleGate, anyone?

Silence…

I am known to talk a lot, and especially to interject rather pointless remarks everywhere, but I fear that from now on I’ll grow ever more quiet. Real life is increasingly busy - that’s what you get when you want to move to another country - and I may not even be able to re-emerge very soon after the move. You do need a good connection to run SL and as of now we - my real life girl and me - have no idea how long it will take us to get that up and running in our new home.

Between work, packing, planning and trying to run my SL shops and introduce new items, I may not be able to blog as much as I would like to, or even be in-world as much as I need to in order to get my fix. Bear with me please - I am not done with SL yet.

In the meantime I’d like to hear from people whose main avatar is not of the same sex as themselves (like me), and who are prepared to talk about it in public. I want to get into the prejudices about gender bending avatars and see if all the guys really make big titted, semi nude porn star avatars to ‘play’ with, and all the women really have ‘pretty boy’ avatars. I’ll contact you people at a later date with some questions and I’d love to include a picture of your avis as well.

Managers’ Disease in the Metaverse

Last night I had my introduction to the new Orientation Station of the Metaverse Mentors and it was fan-tas-tic. Dirk was funny, Savannah was nice, a lot of my friends were there and we were all hand-picked individuals for a very special task. I sat there and felt, well, hoodwinked.

I don’t like corporate drivel. I used to work for a Japanese firm which wanted us all to believe we were part of the same ‘family’ of happy little forklift drones and pallet pushers. It’s a managerial disease based on the belief that you can, and have to, talk people into enthousiasm. It may work for a lot of people but it doesn’t for me – quite on the contrary I should say.

When someone tells me that I was hand-picked after two days in the Second Life Mentor job – which means basically that you help people by pointing them to your experienced colleagues – I know I’m talking to a manager. The kind of guy that would tell you to call your problem a ‘challenge’. The kind of guy that would tell you that you’re part of a very special group of people when you know all your fellow drones came from temp agencies, just like you, and show up only because they want bread on the table.

In this case we don’t get paid, but they seem to have simply recruited whatever Second Life Mentors they could get their hands on. I mean, they also asked someone who uses violence against peaceful demonstrators and insults his colleagues, all while wearing the Mentor tag. And he, then, could have been part of that ‘hand-picked’ group endowed with special powers of freezing and banning on the Metaverse complex, ‘because we trust you’.

It is a great orientation course they have set up – no doubt about it. It’s beautiful, it’s very comprehensive, it is much better than Linden Lab’s confusing Orientation Islands. It also has an altogether more serious look, unlike the Disneyesque castles and volcanoes Linden Lab offers.

But please – if you want me to trust you, talk straight. Spare the predictable managerial babble for the gullible. We get enough of that from a lot of Lindens already.

Orientation Station

Names

You must appreciate the hard work - and probably non-scalable, Daniel must be having fits already - which goes into coming up with last names for our new Residents every once in a while. The formerly very English oriented list is now full of flavours of different continents. I’ve spotted a few Cruyffs already, which are of course named after the famous Dutch soccer player Johan Cruijff. There are people named Bergamasco, a town in and a dog breed from Italy. And there’s Nakamori, maybe after a famous Japanese pop singer. Africa has entered Second Life as well. Pienaar is a well-known South African soccer player and I have also seen a Botha.

A who? There is quite a list of famous South Africans called Botha, and I wouldn’t want to fall into the obvious trap of painting them all with the same brush. But when I see that name, one person alone springs to mind: the sad figure of Pieter Willem Botha, the man who so doggedly clung to Apartheid that he refused to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after that racist form of government had ceased to exist.

In the 1980s, when I was reading everything I could get my hands on about South Africa and when Nelson Mandela became my hero, the name Botha was almost equal to that of Hitler. Here was a living figure of hate, terrifying yet fascinating. The ideal object of my youthful political zeal. I immersed myself in the world of anti-apartheid and anti-racism. One could say that Pieter Willem Botha has had his hand in making me who I am today.

But you have to be realistic about these things. In South Africa, Botha is a name no different than Johnson is in the English speaking world. There’s probably more than one Johnson with a very bad reputation out there and yet you can’t object to the use of that name at all. So welcome to all you young Bothas out there.

And the same, of course, to the new Residents which have chosen the proud name of Noriega.
Who?

Thanks and appreciation go to SLNameWatch.com

Gambling Is Dead, Long Live Gaming!

In their latest blog post, Linden Lab promises to ‘review, investigate and respond to appropriate notices‘ about gambling in Second Life. That means that there will be no active policing. Which means, as I have found out, that nothing much will happen.

I searched for gaming in the Classifieds search engine and discovered that it’s the new gambling. Blackjack, roulette tables, camping devices which let you win a higher payout per minute or more ‘idle cycles’ - it’s all there, run by avatars which are younger than the gambling policy and sometimes on machines built after the introduction of the ban.

Here and there the machines are switched off, and after payment it tells you to ask the owner for a refund. I guess that is one way of making money… Other casinos work with tokens that you can buy; they promise you to refund all your losses eventually, thereby avoiding the gambling ban - or so they say. But a staff member in one such place was happy to pass me a list of casinos, broken down into closed, half empty and still active - and so I found at least one place which doesn’t even advertise as a ‘gaming’ establishment anymore. Welcome to the underground network.

Casino owners go to great lengths, or rather heights, to look compliant on the surface. When I teleported to one ‘former’ casino via Search, an object on the otherwise barren land told me: ‘Laetizia Coronet Gambling is forbidden in SL, please don’t visit this place. Thanks.‘ Through the list provided by the staff member of the ‘legal’ token-based casino however, I end up 400 m above that same spot, in a luxury casino surrounded by Keep SL Gaming Legal signs. Two girls are inside near the roulette table and it’s in full swing (names edited out by me):

[6:50] HRN Roulette GBV.5.0 whispers: 20 seconds until the wheel spins!
[6:50] HRN Roulette whispers: “A V” you bet 4700L$ on 2nd 12
[6:50] HRN Roulette whispers: “A V” you bet 4700L$ on 3rd 12
[6:50] HRN Roulette GBV.5.0 whispers: 10 seconds until the wheel spins!
[6:50] HRN Roulette whispers: “K P” you bet 40L$ on Black
[6:50] HRN Roulette GBV.5.0 whispers: No more bets please ! The ball is in motion. Good Luck!
[6:50] HRN Roulette GBV.5.0 whispers: 22 (Black)
[6:50] HRN Roulette whispers: “K P” you win 80L$ on Black
[6:50] HRN Roulette whispers: “A V” you win 14100L$ on 2nd 12
[6:50] HRN Roulette GBV.5.0 whispers: Ready for new Bets !

Of course, as a Mentor, I am encouraged to send abuse reports upon seeing gambling activity, but clearly discouraged to act like police - volunteer leader Blue Linden really dislikes vigilantes. And therefore the kind of investigation that I have done for this blog is not sanctioned by Linden Lab, which ultimately means that only enthousiastic gamblers will ever find this place - and they are of course not likely to send an abuse report to enforce the hated policy.

What’s left is the usual Linden Lab window dressing. We ban a few words, we publish a harsh policy, and then we’re done with it. You can’t find gambling in the Search engine and therefore it is no longer happening - that’s the image presented to the outside world. In an interview a month ago for a German magazine, about child pornography, our own Philip Rosedale (Philip Linden, the head honcho of LL) even directly contradicts Blue:

“Aber wir haben die Erfahrung gemacht, dass der beste Aufpasser die Community selbst ist. Zum Beispiel haben sich mittlerweile virtuelle Zivilstreifen formiert, die freiwillig „Second Life“ kontrollieren.” ["But we have experienced that the Community itself does the best job in keeping a watchful eye. For example: in the meantime virtual civic patrols have formed which control 'Second Life' voluntarily"]

Long live the vigilantes then - but only when talking to the press, of course.

(comments closed due to high volume of gambling site spam, 5/200

Voices In My Head

At first, the silence was almost eerie. I would land on a busy spot like Help Island Public, only to find everyone just standing around. Occasionally someone would type something. The strangest thing was that there would hardly be a reply. Everyone was of course talking to each other in voice, and last night I enabled it for the first time - I can’t speak yet, but now at least I can listen.

It was hard enough to follow multiple conversations in text chat, but voice is even more confusing. To find out who is talking, you need to rely on a little ‘transmitting’ icon flashing over the head of the speaker - but only if the viewer isn’t laggy. Other than that, there is just a jumble of voices talking, quite detached from the world on your screen.

Instead of imagining that the avatars around me were talking, I pictured real life people at desks with headsets. People who let their little kids say hello, people who inadvertedly breathed into their microphones, people causing echos, transmitting background noises. The viewer, the main square at Help Island, the avatars - it was no longer important. Last night I was witnessing not a conversation on Help Island, but rather a conference call with fancy but useless graphics.

And therein lies the biggest problem in my opinion: the use of real voices - morphed or not - breaks the spell. It introduces an element of life into Second Life which is far more real than any Windlight settings can hope to achieve. Part of the experience has shot forward past all that, straight through the uncanny valley and into reality, detaching itself from the rest.