Strike?

Gwyn initiated it and Rheta is keeping a list of bloggers on strike against the new copyright regulations. But although I support the cause, I choose not to strike along with the rest of them.

The Lab has infuriated me in the past. We’ve had ‘broadly offensive’ and we’ve had ‘Lolita’, we’ve had the removal of a work of art because it had nipples, and we still have age verification. All that has passed by on this blog, and none of it has been enough to make me consider a strike. Hell I’ve been lied to by Robin Linden herself and yet I am still volunteering for the same Lab she’s representing. This copyright question however amazes rather than infuriates me and so striking is not an option.

But you may have noticed that I no longer use the Hallowed Words and Abbreviations. And that won’t change unless there’s any movement in the good direction from the Lab. It may cost me readers, but that’s their loss as well as mine.

The World Is Run By Lawyers

…and lawyers are, by nature, a bunch of pussies. I’m sure they would rather call themselves ‘careful’, but then they’re lawyers. They like to play with words, it’s their thing.

Just now I heard of the first victim of age verification - a woman who cannot access her own store because the landowner has flagged the parcel as mature, or adult, or whatever the extra-mature terminology is they dreamed up for our virtual world. Now hear this, all you Lindens out there:

THIS IS INSANE.

Open Google. Click Preferences. Check ‘Do not filter my search results’. Save preferences.

On the main page, click Images. Fill in a girl’s name - any girl’s name - or the name of a young, attractive female celebrity. And I guarantee you that you will see real life full nudity and possibly hardcore pornographic material, on the first page of the image search results.

Here’s one example I found with Google after a search using the first name of my mother (sorry, mom). I cleaned it up for this blog - actually it is one of the most modest pictures from that page. And it took under five seconds to find it.

And that’s exactly how hard it is for kids. And that’s why as a parent you need to monitor your kid’s internet behaviour. Yes, it takes time away from your precious career but hey, it’s a kid, not the damn DVD player. It needs looking after. And I am not going to do that for you.

Google does not demand age verification. The sites with these pictures do not demand age verification. My ISP never asked me for age verification. The government of this or any other democratic country hasn’t set a minimum age to web access. And therefore the good people that run our virtual world have no obligation whatsoever to introduce age verification.

I don’t know what is wrong with the lawyer folk in San Francisco. Maybe they are hardcore Christian fundamentalists with an agenda to clean the Internet of all the ‘filth’ that’s to be seen. Maybe they are just not ready for the 21st century yet, and still think you can somehow shield people off from mature content. But most likely they are just a bunch of pussies.

While you’re at it, go and see what Google turns up when you search for ‘pussies’ as described above… and don’t for a minute fool yourself into believing that your kids wouldn’t ever try.

Disclaimer: if you think you own the rights to the picture above, shame on you. It’s not even a good photoshop.

All your blogs are belong to us

Feel free to upload and use as a texture. The picture of uncle Phil is one I made myself, so there can’t be many ‘issues’ there. Of course, if you use it on a blog, linking to the source is a nice gesture.

King Day

I know, Martin Luther King day is on his birthday (January 15th) and not on the day he died. But yesterday it was 40 years ago that he was shot in the city of that other King.

Early morning, April 4

Shot rings out in the Memphis sky

Free at last, they took your life

They could not take your pride

U2, Pride (In the Name of Love)

Because of Bono’s stirring song I got my facts mixed up and I was staring into the sun to see his face appear, like it did last year on January 15th. It didn’t, of course. Some other things however did occur.

I witnessed a talk between some people in Waterhead - one of them as black in real life as his avatar in virtual reality. Some others were ganging up on him, trying to make him lose his cool, teasing him with questions like ‘Why is the hair of black people so dirty?’ or ‘Do you have a Jheri curl?’

I am not sure what they were trying to do, but part of it is probably because it is pointless to send abuse reports about things said in voice. There is no proof, there is no record, and so all of a sudden it is safe again to play such silly games. To say stuff to a black guy that you don’t dare say to him in public, face to face. Or typed out in text chat with your avatar’s name attached to it. And so I can only conclude that it is the cheapest form of cowardice - a comparison to gangs of men in white hoods is a gross exaggeration, but the basics are there. You pick a nigger and you go after him, hiding behind a mask or an avatar.

I know the excuse that they will have. The eternal frat boy excuse that it is ‘just for the LULZ’. As if that makes it all right then. It’s a joke, no harm done. Or maybe it’s ‘just roleplay’.

Well, fuck that.

I’ll tell you what it is. It’s sick, it’s twisted, and I want nothing of it. It doesn’t make you a better person, it doesn’t get you brownie points, it is not funny, not new, not original, not intelligent. It is putting the nigger down, and nothing more. Reminding him that after all is said and done, he’s one of them.

I think the people I heard talking didn’t really believe all that crap they were spouting. And if they are smart enough to know that none of that rubbish is true, then I expect them to be smart enough not to go there.

There are no LULZ in racism. Just losers.

• For those who don’t know me - I am a white guy in real life, not a black girl.
• If you want to quote from this piece, I recommend you quote it with the strong language included. I do not mince words on this issue.

Clarity there is… movement there is not.

A day late, but wahey! We have a reply - a further clarification of the stated position, and not an inch of movement on the issue. So we are going to have to talk about the Second Life® world. I guess I can live with the ®, although I still don’t know where on my keyboard it hides. But to urge us not to talk about Second Life proper is insane. I quote:

Always follow a Linden Lab[®] brand name with an appropriate generic noun for at least your first reference to the brand name. A “generic noun” is a common noun and not a proper noun, trademark, or brand name.

Okay… common noun, proper noun, what is this? I quote again - from Wikipedia this time:

Proper nouns (also called proper names) are nouns representing unique entities (such as London, Universe or John), as distinguished from common nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, well or person).

I don’t see the point in this and I don’t see any other company at all doing this. I don’t drink a Coca-Cola softdrink, I drink Coca-Cola. I don’t go to the supermarkt in a Fiat car, I go in my Fiat. And see how I used it in a possessive form - that’s another no-no. [N]ever use it in the plural or possessive form (source). So it’s not my Second Life but my life in the Second Life world. As a linguist I’d say they are trying to change common everyday speech, and that won’t work at all. The only good news is that they allow you to talk like a normal human being, as long as you first go through the prescribed motions. [A]t least your first reference… after that you’re home free.

Of course, people who do not speak English on an advanced level are not going to be able to make any of this at all. Translating from English is my RL job, yet I had to look up proper noun in Wikipedia. But then, people who do not speak English on an advanced level are usually left in the dark about lots of things - last year an angry group of Italians demonstrated at the Main Landing Point in Kirkby about inventory loss, totally unaware of the blog post adressing the issue that same day.

I guess the main focus of the good people who run this virtual world will not be on blogs like this, but on the websites of commercial enterprises and of social communities. But I do think it is a mistake to try to regulate all that free publicity that hundreds of bloggers are generating.

Disclaimers

Fiat is a registered trademark of Fiat S.p.A., Turin (TO), Italy.

Coca-Cola is a registered trademark of The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta (GA), USA

Second Life and Linden Lab are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc., San Francisco (CA), USA.

However, SL is a trademark of Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation, Corte Madera (CA), USA. Visit sl.com!

Referencing you-know-what

I’d like to think that maybe somewhere someone read my blog and decided to give this virtual world I am talking about a try. I haven’t had many readers lately, but it used to be well visited, and even some of those running the virtual world came by, like Torley You-Know-Who.

The other day I was eating in a world famous American hamburger restaurant - I drove there in my car, an Italian automobile produced in Turin. And as I walked over to a table with my tray of French fries, their trademark chicken burger and a widely known brand of dark brown soda, taking care not to spoil anything on my new sports shoes with three stripes, it struck me how hard it would be to describe our world if we would have to leave out all the brand names. Or what a jumble of ™ and (r) and (c) we would find in every text, making it almost illegible.

In any case, the world’s most used text program - yes, I also use the most used operating system, albeit not the latest incarnation - doesn’t make it easy at all to add those little symbols, and I hate to say it, but the provider of this blog doesn’t help much either. And so, thanks to new rules laid down by the people who run this virtual world I am talking about, it is now extra hard to write about it. And maybe the next visitor to this blog won’t know what this world is I am talking about, and therefore cannot give it a try.

But is that my loss?