NippleGate, The Sequel

Imagine this. For SL6B the Vatican decides to build a copy of the Sixtine Chapel and the Raphael Rooms, some of the most famous parts of the Papal castle in Vatican City.

You remember the Vatican. The people that brought us the Index, the Inquisition, the ban on anything remotely sexual apart from making little Catholic kids for your friendly neighbourhood priest to lay his grubby hands on. The Vatican, where you can’t enter unless you adhere to a dress code which makes our PG standard look positively pornographic. That place full of men and women who can’t have sex, cringe at the mentioning of the very word sex, and eternally try to meddle in the sexual habits of all of us. Oh yes, and the Pope lives there, too.

Imagine that Vatican setting up a display on the SL6B sim, next year. I’d love to see that, really I would. I would hang around from the moment Father Benedict or Giovanni rezzes his first prim until after Sister Augustina textures the last corner of the last piece of furniture. Hell I’d help them build it if it means I get to see what happens next: some Linden idiot stepping in to sanitize the build.

Oh and if you think I am overstating my case, have a look at the Gorean exhibit in SL5B (direct teleport link). This time maybe it was Mullah Linden to halt the pernicious exposure of a virtual boob? I mean, what’s stricter than the Vatican? I think the answer to that question points in the direction of Teheran. Or San Francisco…

Raphael, Adam and Eve (1508), fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura, one of the Raphael Rooms (detail).

(SL is a trademark of Linden Research, Inc)

Fuck These Devils And They Laws

(Ice Cube: Go To Church)

Here we are in a world that’s exclusively for people over eighteen, where Lindens don’t hesitate to kick violators of that rule off the main grid, and yet we have “PG” areas. PG means Parental Guidance and it’s a term from the US / British / Australian movie, TV and video games rating system.

Have I got news for you: SL is not PG - SL is, to use the same parlance, rated NC-17. I know it won’t help you sell your precious fake land to companies but that’s where we stand, with NC-17 meaning that ‘no one 17 and under’ is admitted. It’s the Lab’s rule, almost word for word. So why have PG areas within an NC-17 game?

Apparently, some adults don’t like swearing. In real life, these people have fled to the hills to escape normal, everyday people who will say fuck or shit every now and then, and to spare them the chance of ever hearing them say it again, they spend their days in their mountain dwellings roaming Second Life - but only the 30% or so of it which is PG, including a lot of the public areas like Waterhead. It makes, of course, for a totally unrealistic interaction and it’s based on the totally unrealistic idea that somehow we need to all adapt ourselves to the needs of a few hardcore fanatics.

Others have Second Life over an open mike while their kids are in the same room, innocently playing with their sexless-yet-highly-sexual Barbie and Ken dolls. I have two things to say to those. (1) Get a headset. Mine cost me all of five euros which, back then, was six US dollars. (2) Spend time with your kids for a change. It’s a better way to raise them as you’d like to than to forbid everyone else to blurt out the occasional fuck.

What goes wrong here? Australians may refer to a dear friend as their fucker. Brits may refer to an ass when they mean a donkey. Many other Europeans, brought up on a diet of Hollywood movies, may use the word fuck five times every sentence, without realising how bad that really sounds for English speakers. That’s side one. Side two is that I can walk up to Mia Linden and tell her this with impunity: je moet nodig eens van achteren genomen worden door twintig wanhopige Goreans. You can PG-rate all you want but it is only going to help you against English swearing. And the world is no longer an Anglo-American affair.

So, let’s recap. PG exists to protect a minority inside a minority (those Americans, already a minority in SL, who don’t like swearing) and to that end all other cultures and nationalities have to conform to a rule which is wholly alien to them. They have to watch their language, even though to them there’s nothing wrong with it. And they have to watch those overzealous Mentors who will AR even when you say fudge.

Way to go, Lindens.

(SL and Second Life are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.)

Mail from the Lab

Dear Laetizia Coronet, Your submission in the Mentor Directory has been removed. This may be because you have submitted a new listing, or because you have requested its removal. You’ve been removed from the Second Life Mentor group.

Of course, this is due to the AR that Mia sent out after our little run-in on April 19th. And of course I did not ‘request’ this, as the automatically generated message says. That mail is about as wrong as can be - as is this whole sorry affair.

And so, after a year of mentoring, a year of gaining experience in this crazy job, I am no longer a mentor. And eventually this happens to almost all of us, keeping the mentor group as a whole inexperienced and inept. Because sooner or later you are going to lose your cool for a second, and those love spreading hippie idiots of the Lab are going to turn into the police they say they hate, and throw the book at you.

Want my advice? Don’t become a mentor. Don’t become an unpaid worker in the client relations department of the Lab. You get no benefits apart from a laggy party sometimes and a line in Mia’s (and Amber’s, etcetera) profile that says ‘Volunteers Rock!’, which they’ll repeat way too often during their teambuilding efforts - which reminded me of those I attended when I was a forklift driver. I hope you get the picture of the kind of level we’re talking about here. Amateurish doesn’t begin to describe it.

From day one I realised, thanks to this teambuilding thing and the memories which that brought back, that these people are not my friends - they just act as if they are. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’ll be friends with Lindens by becoming a mentor - it’s their job to be friendly and go Woohoo and join in the traditional pie fight. I suspect they are encouraged to put themselves on Facebook as well and be ‘friends’ with everyone. And well, if your goal is to befriend ‘a Linden’ you need to get your head checked anyway - I don’t know about you but I befriend people because I like them as a person.

Don’t become a mentor. Thanks to the example set by people like Mia a lot of mentors act like the police, even amongst themselves in the mentor IM channel, which by now is so strictly policed you can’t ask anything without being attacked by 20 of your colleagues. And because a lot of the mentors act like the police, you won’t get much love from the community either, unless you stay at the orientation islands to help the newest newbies around that impossible build with that impossible HUD.

Despite the obvious flaws and the obvious fakeness of the Lindens’ attitude, I enjoyed being a mentor. I enjoyed my colleagues and the way we used to think about the job, and the way we changed certain things in-world by leading through example. But that mostly came from the Mental Mentors group and not from the official one. And it most certainly did not come from the Lab at all. They just follow automated procedures and send automated mails, as the corporate hotshots that they are.

Perhaps one day they’ll replace Mia and Lexie and Amber with bots. What an improvement that would be - then at least you’d know you’re dealing with a machine.

What’s in a name?

In the real world there is of course more than one Catherine Fitzpatrick - in fact, the first hit of my Google search for that name points to someone of Greenpeace Australia - and I really don’t think it’s the same person who is behind the famous Second Life persona Prokofy Neva. And that’s without expressing any preconceived notions about Neva’s political views. In Second Life there is only one Prokofy Neva - each and every one of our names is unique, even though we do have a Gwyneth Llewelyn and a Gwyneth Llewellyn these days.

Not so on Facebook, of course. Facebook doesn’t rely on the uniqueness of names, simply because names are not unique in the real world. Anyone can open a Facebook account with any name - in fact there’s more than a handful of Catherine Fitzpatricks on this community site. But, again, there’s only one Prokofy Neva. And I don’t think it’s too much of a guess to say that the Prokofy Neva on Facebook is not the Prokofy Neva we all know:

Oh yes, we are sometimes made to believe that griefing in SL is a very interesting phenomenon worth five pages in a magazine once famous and respected (and nerdy) enough to be featured in The Simpsons as one of Lisa’s reads (Homer - with typical acciddental aptness - misreads the name as ‘Weird’). So tell me what’s interesting about taking the whole business of ‘attacking the seriousness of Second Life’ off the world and into the Internet at large? That’s not griefing - that’s stalking, that’s harassment, and that’s sick. That kind of behaviour deserves that feared ride in the FBI party van. Or at least the party van of any of a host of mental institutions.

You can argue that Neva is partly responsible for such pranks - it doesn’t help to shout ‘terrorism’ at the first sight of a lolcube - but isn’t that argument dangerously close to saying that a rape victim ‘asked for it’ by the way she dressed or by being in the place she was in? Neva has the right to call it terrorism, or Communism (another favoured label of his), or Catholicism for all I care. Opinions, however overstated they are, are not invitations to stalking or griefing.

And it raises another question - who has the rights to our Second Life names? I do think that someone who’s been using the name Prokofy Neva for such a long time should have at least some rights to the name, when used in connection with Second Life. I dare say that even I have some rights to the name Laetizia Coronet, being that I have been using it since November of ‘06. But is the use of my name protected in-world? I think not - only the name Linden is, and misusing it makes one a target for disciplinary action.

Maybe the ToS can be read in such a way as to prohibit misuse of names, but I am not sure that if I come across a Prokofy Neva Porn Shop, the Lab would take action. It wouldn’t hurt to have it written in plain English somewhere in the ToS: use of the unique name of other Residents without their consent is prohibited.

Come on, Lindens. After all the protection you’ve granted yourselves it’s time you grant us some.

(Second Life, SL and Linden Lab are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.)

M.I.A.

I discovered it too late, because Yahoo decided to drop the message from Linden Lab into the bulk folder, but there it was – disciplinary action has been taken against me. I’ll tell you what happened.

Last Saturday was one of the rare moments in the weekend that I am on Second Life. I was happily building away when someone on an IM channel said she was being flooded at Pooley. Out of couriousity I TP’d over and found myself knee deep (and more) in griefer cubes. Fine then – send an AR and get out. However, Doc Gascoigne called me at that moment for an urgent delivery of T-shirts for the new Mentors – the ones they had available read “Security” which is exactly what Mentors are not supposed to be. So I went off-world, forgot about building, and managed to make some hopefully acceptable shirts for the newly minted Mentors. Mind you, the grad party was already under way.

Back to the grid I went. I delivered the shirts to Mia Linden and got no reply. I IM’d Doc and got no reply. Thinking I had better go there myself I went over to the SL Volunteer Island complex, in the middle of which the party was in full swing. These are Mature rated islands that are furthermore off bounds to non-volunteers.

At the four sim crossing where the party was held, lag was terrible. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t see properly, I couldn’t do anything. Four times or so I got close to Mia, but when I tried to get closer I ended up half a sim away. A very frustrating experience if you have an urgent message to deliver. And so, in my anger, I typed “Fuck this place” – or words to that effect, it had the word Fuck in it anyway – and clicked Shout. Remember, I was in a complex of Mature and furthermore private sims.

Then Mia got to me, thanking me for the shirts, and in the same breath berating me for what I just shouted across the party. That’s just typical, I thought, and I first told her that I was in a Mature sim (and I added a smiley) after which she told me she knew the guidelines very well. “You know what, Mia?” I said next. “AR me.” I knew it could cost me my Mentorship but at that time I really didn’t care anymore. She said she would, and apparently she did. Being that I am hardly ever in Second Life on weekends, I never noticed until I found that mail. I am still a Mentor – apparently one can be disciplined and maintain Mentorship.

A stressful hour, beginning with griefer cubes, a request I happily (and at the cost of 20 of my own Linden dollars for uploading) and swiftly obliged to, the insane lagginess of that party I only went to because of those damn shirts, and the non-responsiveness of people you just finished an urgent assignment for, was reason for me to say ‘fuck’.

Mia Linden does not understand this. Mia Linden never says ‘fuck’ even though she has a New York accent broader than that of Fran bloody Drescher. Mia Linden is an absolutely saintly person – and therefore hasn’t the slightest idea of how real people react to things. She would have reacted with a hearty ‘Golly!’ or an honest ‘Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!’ and that would be all – because nothing is going to knock her train of happy, positive thoughts off the rails, don’t you know.

I am still a Mentor. But I am wondering why I would be volunteering for Mia, or doing anything for her at all, for that matter. If she is so fucking saintly I am sure she can conjure up happy T-shirts for all to wear while being immersed in griefer cubes, loudmouth newbies demanding help and Waterhead regulars calling her a nigger bitch. And so she really doesn’t need me to do all that for her. Because that’s what I fucking do out there - taking shit for the Lindens. Every goddamn day.

So Mia, next time you need anything at all for your happy band of volunteers sending positive rays all over the grid, don’t come asking. You know the reply, girl. It starts with F.

(Second Life and Linden Lab are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.)

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.

Neva Wants Linden SWAT

“…and this is the season

to let the real muthaphuckkin G’s in” (Eazy E, Real Muthaphuckkin G’s)

In the drab suburb of Rotterdam I grew up in we played soccer (’football’ if you must) on the dog doo infested grass between some appartment blocks. One of the balconies adjacent to our playground belonged to an old woman and if your ball - the sporty kids always tried to outdo each other with expensive new soccer balls - landed there, it was said, she’d stab it with a kitchen knife before giving it back. I’ve never seen it happen, but you know the kind of old woman I am talking about. Tired of the world, vengeful, hateful, ever complaining about ‘the youth of today’.

Enter Prokofy Neva’s long rant about what he calls infohub infestations, or “The idiots who loiter around the Infohubs or Welcome Areas, Behaving Badly.” Ah, we are talking straight griefing, Prokofy? I’m with you then. But no, “These hags stand around in little knots, cracking dumb jokes, acting faux-polite and faux-helpful in that really annoying hubber way to newbies, pretending to be good citizens, [...and...] play sound clips — they’ve got the usual annoying repertoire, from tag lines like that idiot saying ‘Oh yiissss’ in WoW or various movie tag lines ‘Houston, we have a problem‘…“

The corner of the curtain behind the geraniums moves and Prok peeks out. “There’s a certain type — we’ve all seen them. A clear marker is having a deliberately ugly avatar. An avatar deliberately made very fat or very thin, misshapen, as if to say ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what everybody else is doing.’” And the problem is… what exactly? Ugliness? No, it’s far worse: “The deliberately ugly avatar statement annoys or confounds or confuses newcomers — they head swiftly away, sometimes never to return to SL ever again.“

Now really. I wonder what type of person would run away from SL because of ugly avatars. Maybe some delicate little empty-headed Barbiedoll, “we’ve all seen them“, stamping her little foot and asking hubby-dear who those ugly people are across the fence in her new suburbian garden. Or maybe indeed that old soccer ball stabbing sociopath.

Surely some Welcome Areas and Infohubs are a problem. Bumping people off, misleading newbies, shooting, what have you. Pity the newbie who comes from Orientation Island straight to Waterhead - but Prokofy’s threshold is already breached in peaceful Ross and she wants not a sheriff but a Linden Lab goonsquad to come to the rescue: “And yes, the Lindens need to swoop down like a SWAT team [...] everywhere, and with surprise, and strategically…“

Whoa. Linden Lab needs to pay people (Prokofy makes clear he doesn’t mean Residents of volunteers, but paid employees of LL) to come in and stop people from hanging around public areas. Everywhere, and with surprise, and strategically. I wonder what picture he has formed in his mind. Is it perhaps that of the Russian OMON beating up homosexual protesters? After all, their protest is a way “to say ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what everybody else is doing.’” Or is it that of the South African Police of the pre-Mandela era, firing shotguns at kaffers? That makes sense - after all, the South African Boere were just as fond as Prokofy of calling everyone a ‘terrorist’.

Yes, I am grossly exaggerating, I know it. But it’s Prokofy, the man who is calling people leninist, terrorist, communist, racist or antisemitic all the time, so I have a right to overstate my case as grossly as he does. The whole thing eventually boils down to this: if your way of enjoying Second Life does not comply with Prokofy Neva’s standards, you should be muscled out of your favourite hangout. And if Linden lab is ‘communist’, then that is ‘fascist’.

Really, I’d rather see Linden Lab crack down on the real problems of Second Life, and by that I don’t mean the youth hanging around Waterhead or the frat boy pranksters of Woodbury, but the real griefers, the sim crashers, the Nightmare Dench types. And not with a SWAT team, because that is useless against throwaway alts, but with technology. But Prokofy hates technology because he doesn’t grasp an inch of it - that’s strictly for tekkie-wikis, who I’m sure are the next group Prokofy wants the Linden SWAT to go after.

Sorry, no new post

You know, I was working on a nice questionnaire for the Lindens to fill in. Nothing ‘political’, nothing controversial (really!), and fully anonymous. I would like to know, and let you know, what it is actually like to work for Linden Lab and be a Linden in-world. Until Torley told me that that should - or in any case would - go through the marketing department of Catherine Linden.

Which makes the whole process of fact finding pointless, just because of the off chance that someone gets the bright idea to tell the responders what a good answer would be and what not. Of course I am not saying that that will happen. But I don’t want to waste my time and find a truckload of happy smiley answers in my mailbox, saying that all is well and we’re one jolly family. I can write those myself.

Linden Lab is becoming increasingly corporate about a lot of things. Of course there are areas where they had to get their ass in gear so to speak, but they have lost a lot along the way - especially trust and goodwill. I find myself already wondering if volunteering for a profit making corporation, trying to keep new customers inside, is something I should do. I mean - would you do that for your local supermarket or your Internet provider?

So, instead of some lighthearted insight in the world of the Lindens, there’s no new post today.