Gone, but not forever

Tomorrow I will close the door of my real life house in Tilburg, the Netherlands, for the last time. I am flying to Italy on saturday, to live with the love of my life! Alas, it means that I will be unable to log on to Second Life, maybe for a month, maybe even more. There will eventually be DSL, but when that will happen, is unclear.

I wish you all a good time in SL and RL and I hope you’ll remember me when I reappear!

love, Tish Coronet.

Death of a city?

In the real world I never had much love lost for Amsterdam. I was born in the rival city of Rotterdam; we like to think Amsterdam is just an open air museum with hookers and junkies as an added attraction. But still… it is a fascinating place, for all it’s faults.

The Amsterdam of Second Life was a caricature of my first life ideas about the city. The Royal Palace was a sex club, and on a seedy corner between a grubby hotel and an even grubbier porn cinema the hookers were competing for a spot. Behind them the famous red velvet windows were waiting for those who wished to perform a dance or take a shower in full view of any passer-by. I hated the city - a great build ruined by that caricature of cheap whores and cannabis, with not an inch of the rich culture of our capital - like the Van Gogh Museum or the Anne Frank House - to be found anywhere. But I loved the city, too, when I was a newbie. It tickled my senses in ways you don’t want to admit are possible.

After the place was sold by Stroker Serpentine for a ridiculous sum of money I never went back. Until yesterday. And while the real city is trying to clean up it’s famous red light district, the Second Life version is already past that. The windows are there but the poseballs are gone. The seedy hotel is there, but the furniture is gone. And the cinema is a work in progress, just like the once utterly nasty public lavatories in the other corner. All that’s left of Stroker’s Amsterdam, it seems, is the drugs trade.

All the rest is changed or changing. The Nieuwe Kerk or New Church has been transformed, just like in real life, from an empty hulk to a museum. Currently they are showing works by Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, but a living artist with a Second Life presence is on the agenda. Culture at last!

Outside there’s even a little café with a terrace, oddly enough sponsored by Dutch weather site buienradar.nl. And where formerly hardly anyone ever went - the southern neighbour sim now called Amsterdam 2 - there is the beginning of a sanitized and regulated new Red Light District, with a row of identical pole dancing windows and a dance club.

Yet… in a sim which used to be filled to capacity on a regular basis, I found myself visiting with three other people. The place is brimming with For Rent signs. It seems that if you sanitize this city, you take the life out of it. Mayor Job Cohen had better take notice.

Damrak, Amsterdam - eerily empty [SLurl here]

Good Grief!

When you’ve filled out your umpteenth Abuse Report and you know that help for those stricken by particle, noise, and/or object spam is not going to come very fast - especially on the Mainland - you can’t help but feel utterly powerless in the face of a single malignant other. You know the perp will be kicked from the grid and you know he or she will come back. And you know the crap that he’s rezzed is going to stay where it is for a long time before any Linden has time to clean up.

There is talk of restricting the use of LSL - Linden Scripting Language - to avatars of a certain age, like a week or a month. That won’t work as a stand-alone measure, because griefers can easily set up one account to create scripted objects and countless others to spread these across the grid. But when combined with an analysis of the transaction history of a griefer alt, it could prove a powerful weapon indeed. That’s going after the ‘dealers’, so to speak, the creators and spreaders of griefer tools.

A second measure would be to give the SL Mentors as a group certain rights of removal on Linden owned sims. It sounds scary and there is ample opportunity for misuse of powers, but what if Mentors were forced to fill out a form like an Abuse Report, each time they remove objects from the Mainland? Let’s just call it a Removal Report, with a snapshot of the object included as per default, and not a lot of detailed explaining. A fast drop down with key words is enough - location, time etc. can be included automatically. With self-replicating boxes all around you, you need to work fast. Such a measure would save Linden Lab valuable time in cleaning up and as a bonus it would give the community a renewed sense of safety when they see that help - real help - is just around the corner.

Finally I would like to see an analysis of LSL commands used by griefers, and a reappraisal of their usefulness for the building and scripting community at large. Those commands used only rarely for benevolent purposes - I would guess that self-replication is such a function - could then be scrapped. Of course that impinges on our freedoms, but isn’t griefing much more of an attack on our freedoms? Do I have to sustain self-replicating prim attacks all the time because two or three people may want to make scripted popcorn?

In an interview in 1961, Nelson Mandela hinted at the change of course the then non-violent ANC was taking: I think the time has come for us to consider, in the light of our experiences at this day at home, whether the methods which we have applied so far are adequate. Indeed.