Editorial: Sympathy for Prokofy Neva
by Alphaville Herald on 21/06/05 at 6:10 pm
Prok, then Dyerbrook, delivers a lamp to an SSG property in Alphaville.
The Herald has long been familiar with the antics of Prokofy Neva. We first encountered him in his incarnation as Dyerbrook on TSO where we witnessed his campaign against the Sim Shadow Government, which he perceived to be a kind of virtual aristocracy, and altogether too tight with Will Wright and the BDSM community. In those days the battle seemed a bit like Prok was tilting at windmills, since the SSG was at bottom just an elite guild dominating the server, and there was no real-world money at stake. Prok’s protests, however, seemed appropriately whimsical – delivering lamps to SSG controlled properties in order to shine light on the darkness that the SSG supposedly brought to the game. No less whimsical was his Sims Out of Line web site, which chronicled his heroic adventures against the forces of darkness on TSO.
Prok was also vigorous in his campaign against the Herald for reasons that remain obscure to us, but which apparently had to do with the Herald being too cozy with the SSG and the darksiders, and for allegedly failing to live up to Prok’s standards of journalistic integrity. To prove his point, Prok created an avatar which presented as a 15-year-old girl, had her go visit the wiccans in Alphaville, exchange friendship balloons with the senior wiccans and participate in events with them, and then come to the Herald asking to be interviewed. The resulting interview and comment thread remain a Herald classic, but also stand as testimony to the fact that we know full well that Prok is a pain in the ass (hereafter PITA). We smiled and went about our business, knowing that the opinion of one PITA as to our integrity wasn’t going to do us much harm.
Prok’s campaign against the BDSM scene on TSO resulted in comment threads in the Herald that topped 400 posts, and his position was viewed as being puritanical, but our take is somewhat different. Prok’s objection was not to the sex part, but to the celebration of enslavement. The tone of the debates between Prok and the BDSMers was harsh, but we think that the many participants in those debates, including Toy, Maria, Lady Juliana, and Mikal, would agree that it gave their community the opportunity to articulate their position in response. No one ever asked that he be prevented from posting on the Herald. We doubt it would have occurred to anyone to ask.
When Prok first arrived in Second Life we considered it newsworthy enough to run an article called The Second Coming of Dyerbrook, and we anticipated, quite correctly it seems, that he would have a major impact in the game. We were expecting the impact to come when he clashed with the Gorean community, but in fact it seems to have come with SL’s answer to the SSG: The Feted Inner Core (FIC).
We take Prok’s position to be this: the FIC is a group of Brahmins in the community who receive special help and attention from the Lindens and who work against newcomers and outsiders who want to come in and become successful virtual business persons. We doubt the FIC actually works like this, and any attempt to identify a social aristocracy is bound to be problematic, but it does need to be observed that there has never actually been a society of any interest that did not have an aristocracy of some form or another, whether it coalesced intentionally or not. Despite utopian dreams, there’s no reason Second Life should be any different. Is the FIC our aristocracy? Well, we can debate the thesis, and either reject it or refine it, but it is hard to dismiss it out of hand.
This leads us to the board wars between the FIC and Prok. Boards are ugly places where innocent comments can lead to flame wars in short order. In a place like Second Life, where the distinction between game and reality breaks down completely, charges of unfair business practices become amplified and are easily taken as attacks on the target’s real-life ethics and integrity. It is no small wonder that members of the so-called FIC took umbrage at Prok’s charges, and he at theirs. Matters were not helped by Prok’s posting style, which is at once confrontational, unfiltered, and unrelentingly detailed to the point of being spammish.
Despite the “fairly unbalanced ™” nature of Prok’s campaign, we believe that his is a valuable voice in the Second Life community. We believe that the reaction of the alleged FIC and other community members was just as problematic on several counts. They could have just put him on ignore, or could have just shrugged off his accusations, or they could have done as some have and had fun with the accusations and made light of them, but going ballistic seems to us a response that is at least as unbalanced as anything Prok has done. One of Prok’s charges that was taken most seriously was that people were farming IP addresses from third-party Web sites (though for what purpose, we can’t imagine). Of course Prok has been accusing the Herald of the same thing for a year. Our response is, So what? Prok can say what he wants and people can believe what they want and if they want to believe him, that is their issue. It’s a mark of how close to home Prok’s charges hit that some individuals lashed back with such bile.
Our greater concern here is ultimately not the virtual stoning of Prok by the FIC, but the Lindens’ response to the stoning: banning Prok from the forums. This reaction strikes us as ill-advised. It appears to us that there was nothing injurious about Prok’s posts per se, but that the Lindens were more concerned with the reaction his posts inspired. Was he inciting anger? Hell yes. Is that grounds for banning? Hell no.
Prok is principally advancing a substantive thesis about the distribution of capital in the game (including attention capital from the Lindens); he is not a troll. While this led to ever more vituperative exchanges on the boards, it is not an excuse to ban Prok, but is rather a reason to exercise proper board management. Censoring where appropriate, offering steering posts, meting out warnings with a balanced hand and taking matters off board. If this was done, it wasn’t done well. We have dealt with Prok on this board for nearly two years now and have not had problems with him as a poster.
Perhaps the Lindens were concerned about possible lawsuits emerging from the board wars. If there was a kind of legal cover-your-ass motivating this then their action was no less problematic. If they were attempting to protect Prok – banning as a kind of protective custody – this is problematic as well. What exactly their motivation was is unclear. We sent a version of this editorial to Linden Lab for comment (the Herald has been asked to at least check in with LL before presuming we know what’s going on down at the lab) but we received no response.
Whatever their motivation, we urge the Lindens to reconsider their action in this case. In a way, Linden Lab, by silencing Prok’s voice of protest, has done its best to create an FIC in Second Life, by removing an opposing viewpoint from the debate. We believe that the proper way to deal with protest that is driven by philosophical and ethical concerns – no matter how implausible those concerns might seem to our ears – is not to ban the protestor, but rather to engineer some way in which the protestor’s voice can be heard without the business of the community grinding to a halt. Great societies form not by gathering the like-minded into one place and banishing the dissenters to another (“Second Life, love it or leave it”?); they form because a place has been created where a diversity of opinions and styles of expressing them can co-exist, whether or not they grate against each other in uncomfortable ways. If Second Life is successful and survives for many years there will be many more protestors to come, and many of them will have legitimate agendas and sound arguments, and they will meet the same reaction as Prok is encountering here. Banning Prok establishes a horrible precedent for those future conflicts.
Roberta Dalek
Jun 21st, 2005
Well a discussion in which everyone agrees doesn’t serve much purpose.
I’m concerned with the Pathfinder Linden comments on IRC re:Prokovy. IRC seems to be a nest of vipers anyway.
nerferder
Jun 22nd, 2005
The most important thing that some people miss is that these issues that Prok has, which have been labeled as something beneficial, i.e, the “voice of opposition”, etc., evolved form interpersonal conflicts with INDIVIDUALS. If one attacks enough individuals over a period of time, in this case over 3/4 of a year, they are bound to start to feel some common ground, and address the attacks as a common front. This then was construed as an organized effort to fight back, which was then labeled as the FIC, among other pejorative terms.
Honestly speaking, I have never seen someone have so many issues, with so many people, of such a broad spectrum. First he claimed that it was the oldbies who were FIC. Then, when some midbies and newbies took exception to his attacks, he morphed it into “a state of mind”. Too convenient, and too obvious.
When people would defend themselves, Prok used this to bolster his claims that the FIC exists, especially if the target du jour was backed up by anyone else. Ironic, because Prokofy and his crew would do the same thing whenever one of their own came under scrutiny.
It’s one thing to offer social commentary in a broad sense. However, Prok routinely attacked individual people, their businesses and their motives. He went about it all wrong. Instead of addressing LL, or creating propositions and the like, he railed at individuals and accused them of all sorts of nefarious activity and motivations. His real issue is with LL, not other SLers who live withing the boundaries set forth by LL.
Worse yet, he engaged in activities which he himself railed against. He claimed one well known SLer was male, when in fact, it is well established that she is indeed a female. He claimed libel, while he libeled SLU/Snapzilla. There are several other examples of this type of hypocritical behavior.
I think that this is a big part of the reason LL decided to silence him. After multiple warnings and suspensions, including suspensions of 2 or 3 alt accounts, he would just thumb his nose at LL upon expiration of the respective suspensions and pick up right where he left off. He has no one to blame for that but himself. Simply put, poor impulse control.
I am not sure why this publication thinks that Prokofy deserves immunity from permanent forum banning. He was given ample chances to tone it down, and he simply refused to. This action would have been taken against any SLer who repeatedly violated the forum guidelines, most notably the “trolling” clause. I am quite sure he was warned of this possibility in the form of correspondence from LL.
It’s also important to note that no precedent was set here. Prokofy was not the first, nor we he be the last to be banned from the forums. I know of two other persistent trolls that were perma-banned, and they hardly generated a ruckus at the level which Prokofy did. Prokofy has even engaged one of them over on SLU. How ironic. Two of the three biggest trolls in SL’s history engaged in virtual fisticuffs. Fitting in a sense.
In closing, the majority of of people I have spoken to in SL about this banning feel it was well deserved, and most of them do not even participate on the forums. I think that this is very telling, and it reinforces my belief that LL was looking out for not only their own best interest, but that of their customer base as well.
Joe Public
Jun 22nd, 2005
I think prok makes some good points at times…BUT:
Prok needs to stop whining and take a look at his/her own behavioural pattern. Multiple online worlds, same behaviour, same result. He/she seems to derive a large amount of his/her gaming pleasure from playing this particular role…well, other people get theirs from cozying up to the developers.
Big deal. Don’t like it?
Debate it in a rational manner or just change the channel.
He/she might also try cutting the size of their posts down as well, after a while they end up just saying the same thing over and over and over and over etc etc etc etc etc etc
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Benjamin Franklin
Walker Spaight
Jun 22nd, 2005
Nerferder, thank you for your post above. I agree with you that the style of Prok’s posts made it nigh on impossible for his message to be heard. However, I for one still feel a forum ban was too harsh, warnings do not seem to have been given in equal measure where there was equal blame, and the new policy of linking forum actions and in-world actions is not a constructive one.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 22nd, 2005
Walker, I don’t think you read most of my posts or you wouldn’t be saying that — you, like others, found them “too long” but I think their detailed explique of the nastiness of others, their point-by-point rebuttals, and their reasoned, no-nonsense tone is a record that stands and will continue to stand. Let me put it to you very personally, Walker: you don’t need to step on former friends (me), you don’t need to disassociate yourself from “forum kooks” (me), to achieve your goal of evolving from a game journalist to a real journalist. It’s not necessary. No, it is not. And frankly, I don’t think I’ll be talking to you inworld again unless you go to the trouble of reading this long, but very necessary point-by-point critique of what is a very crystallized FIC attack, and come back and tell me you “get it”. If you “don’t get it”, well, good luck in your career with the bourgeois media : )
Nerferder, like Weedy Herbst and many other forums posters who made constant, belligerent attacks on me, seemed to believe that if they repeated a smear or a lie enough times, if they misrepresented what I wrote enough times, it would “stick”. But the record is easily accessed and speaks for itself. It’s precisely because many people like Walker are too busy, or get bored too easily, to follow these more intricate texts, that we have to keep sparring here. But once again, I’ve got to be “repetitive” and counter and rebut each of Nerverder’s false claims, precisely because he is using this tactic himself to wear down, drumbeat, obfuscate, confuse, etc. The propagandistic style of the posts alone ought to be enough for a reputable journalist like Walker not to be “thanking” him for the posts.
“The most important thing that some people miss is that these issues that Prok has, which have been labeled as something beneficial, i.e, the “voice of opposition”, etc., evolved form interpersonal conflicts with INDIVIDUALS.”
I think it’s always useful to return to the original “They Don’t Get It And I Sure Don’t” thread that began most of my original forum wars. http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=31559
I invite you all to read it, and since it is not a Jeska-closed thread, to comment on it.
This wasn’t my first post, but since it was the first one in which I developed the concept of the Feted Inner Core and then took on a fight against it, it’s instructive to forum students and just those interested in the story of my banning.
Whatever the elements of this so-called “interpersonal fight” it contains all the classic hallmarks of the essential SL narrative:
o an older player buys a large part of a sim and sets up what others believe to a competent and whimsical but intrusive build that interferes with their enjoyment of the game as they understand it
o a younger player and very new player object to the high-handed inconsiderate nature of the content-rich on the residential-oriented
area of sims
o the older player accuses the younger player of being a rapacious land baron, just out to buy up and sell sims and make a profit, and goes further to imply bourgeous tastes with lots too crowded like suburban tracts, “picket fences” (though there are none), etc.
o there being no dispute resolution devices in the game and no good will, the dispute festers and is taken to the forums, though in their hysteria and resolve to prevail, the FICs in question never seem to realize that nobody has asked them to change a thing, or do a thing, but merely asked if they should plan on moving due to FIC resolve to domineer the horizon with their taste in content (King Kong, etc.)
This is an extremely common dispute within SL, and if you lather, rinse, repeat — especially with the “lather” of anger on the forums, you have many of the nastiest forum and inworld exchanges in a nutshell. Far from being some “interpersonal” irrelevant matter, the conflict goes to the heart of the game’s problems for many: on the one hand, the early beta testers and tekkies and artisans who helped shape and create the world and then began to feel it was crowding up with commercialized interests and land baron greed as well as Ken and Barbie (as Eggy Lippman’s memorably put it the other day in yet-another anti-TSO post). And on the other hand, masses of people entering the game primarily for socializing and residential purposes, not sandboxing.
For their part, those more interested in “playing house,” i.e. socializing, coupling, friending, building neighbourhoods etc find the arrogance, self-centeredness, and inconsiderateness of the beta-testers and their ilk to be a considerable obstacle and hobble on the game’s expansion and development.
So call this an “interpersonal conflict” if you like, but it is merely the manifestation of a class warfare or a culture wars within the game that the FIC hopes to distract from, and deny, as part of their strategy in prevailing in it.
“If one attacks enough individuals over a period of time, in this case over 3/4 of a year, they are bound to start to feel some common ground, and address the attacks as a common front. This then was construed as an organized effort to fight back, which was then labeled as the FIC, among other pejorative terms.”
This misrepresents the story, as anyone can see just by starting with this thread. The FIC arrives full-blown at a situation like this, where they fight to the death for the following attitudes: 1) I can do what-the-fuck-I-want on my property; 2) content is king; 3) right of way for all scripts regardless of their damage; 4) anti-business but my business; 5) tekkie wiki 6) protectivenesss and suck-ups to LL.
All the FIC regulars, all those who ultimately joined in a victory dance, or who were named by Nerferder right here on this forum, and all those who were most vicious in their attacks, are right there to be see on Word One and Day One in this thread and related ones in the following day — far from that incoherent and singled group that Nerferder false claims. The wagon-circling and “protection of the honour of uniform” began immediately and continued apace. The “feted inner core” was originally a term to describe *those posters* but also others with whom I had incredible encounters in the game, as I saw that they were willing to lag sims down to 37, inconvenience their neighbours and render their land useless and even unsellable, they were able to proceed with impunity with Lindens standing by merely wringing their hands, but those trying to protest, also using content they had created, wound up getting on 3-day bans.
These were some of my early exposures to the gross and mind-boggling bias and unfairness in the way the AR system is used and the way the Lindens respond. For so long they’ve been coddling and feting their charges from the beta-test love-fest, that they’ve completely lost touch with reality.
Nerferder implies that I attacked people randomly, single, individually, based on little personal beefs, and then gradually, one by one, they began to coalesce, even despite all their own differences, or not knowing each other, and fought me. But that’s silly as the record easily establishes that whatever claims these folks have to not knowing each other or being individuals, when it comes to the forums, they act *as one,* as a single, Collective Mind of vicious junkyard dogs and jackals, as I often very aptly called them, with exactly the same point of view: that they must stop at nothing, they must brook no dissent, in maintaining the primacy of the FIC-viewpoint, which is: content is king, residential livers are bourgeois afterthoughts, “anti-business-any-business-but-mine-and-my-friends” and the thousands of other little details that spell out the FIC mentality on the forums and in the world — the belief that they are superior beings, with real or perceived merit in content creation, and therefore entitled to stay in charge of the world without any scrutiny or pushback. Uri is correct in calling this the “game aristocracy”.
“Honestly speaking, I have never seen someone have so many issues, with so many people, of such a broad spectrum. First he claimed that it was the oldbies who were FIC. Then, when some midbies and newbies took exception to his attacks, he morphed it into “a state of mind”. Too convenient, and too obvious.”
That’s hardly the case, and we have only again to look at Pahoa Jade and co. These people displaying this mentality, or even involved in this original dispute over some water with a kitschy build in it that some found intrusive (the ultimate irony to me, always a delightful one, is that the same FIC who claim it’s the Prokites who are picket-fencers and bourgeois themselves have hideous bourgeois tastes in art and design at times — this was epitimozed by Maxx Monde’s famous lament on Sluniverse.com that SL had turned into suburbia and he couldn’t find the “artists’ enclave” — when he wound up smack in the middle of the newly-renovated suburban “artists’ enclave” LOL called Boardman).
I’ve always said that “FIC” is an attitude and a state of mind. It is most often reflected by oldbies and beta-testers. But there are some brand-new apprentices, like Ingrid Ingersoll, who readily adapted the same mentality and preferences and forum stances. It’s one of the FIC’s tactics to make it out that Prok is “against all oldbies”. I have some very nice oldbie friends, and some of their friends sometimes come to me and lament that I shouldn’t hate them — and I point out that I don’t hate oldbies, I don’t hate beta-testers, I don’t hate them as individuals, I hate the *attitude of the FIC* which is the condescending, hectoring, belittling, nasty, vindictive attitude of those ruling the boards now. This is about the forums first and foremost. It’s about the culture of the forums. It’s about the culture that still exists there, even with my departure, even with new draconian rules, in the minds of the few who keep persistenly manifesting and producing it and still have the Lindens unaware and cowed — precisely becuase Lindens are merely morphed and evolved versions of FIC, older players or particularly exceptional players who applied for jobs at LL and got inducted into the Masonic Society.
“When people would defend themselves, Prok used this to bolster his claims that the FIC exists, especially if the target du jour was backed up by anyone else. Ironic, because Prokofy and his crew would do the same thing whenever one of their own came under scrutiny.”
Again, I think it’s always helpful to look at the record of the Pahoa Jade thread, and another classic, the Midge thread.
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=34329&highlight=Midge
This thread is famous for Ardith Mifflin appearing in a huff and announcing haughtily, “Wake me when a group like Bedazzle insitutes a similar plan.” That says it all — that notion that only the highest form of aesthetic development can command participation and only projects of this type can be initiated to try to manage sims better. I’ve always ferociously reacted to the idea that only the top artists and artisans get to shape the landscape in SL — I am for SL remaining democratically and equally accessible to all levels of talent. If I want to right-click on a jpeg on the Internet of a weatherbeaten board, and build a dock where maybe the corners don’t match perfectly because I didn’t build by “the numbers,” and if I want to put down a prefab of a Cape Cod salt box and create a world in miniature that feels like a seaside beach town, that is my right, and if someone finds it tacky, inept, Ken and Barbie, bourgeous, they need to keep right on flying to the next sim — there are at least 599 other ones now to chose from.
“It’s one thing to offer social commentary in a broad sense. However, Prok routinely attacked individual people, their businesses and their motives.”
With raising this issue of “the personal attack” and “the business attack”, Nerferder hopes to achieve his greatest following. But he’s not really able to come up with a real list of citations of real personal attacks because that’s not how I posted. It was the FIC that made the nasty, vituperative personal attacks, and in fighting back, I lobbed off comments sometimes that for many months, might lead to a thread closing but never led to be being edited or warned unformally. I think it’s instructive to recall that until about 45 days ago, when I began to fight back really hard because the FIC changed to really nasty tactics, I never received a single warning, edit, mild reprimand in confidential chat — nothing. That’s because there was nothing there.
I haven’t attacked people’s *businesses* in the way that Nerferder imagines (one would like to credit Nerferder with genuine thoughts and emotions evoked by sincere feelings, but of course the use of all the typical Bolshevik propaganda devices mitigate against that hope). As indicated in the other thread, in every single case, they slammed me and my character and my business first, and many times over, before I began to single out a common theme of the FIC attacks against me — the top creators in every single important SL field, who felt they must guard their bastions at all costs not only from me, a non-creator, but from others who might begin to compete more readily if the FIC removed their hammerlock on the market which they maintain through a combination of freebie saturation, newbie stream grabbing, Linden endorsement, misuse of the helper/mentor system, old privileges like the free 4096, and finally, and triumphantly, misuse of the AR system.
It’s attacking this set of privileges and their pernicious and devastating effect on the game’s development, that was my forum goal.
When Kex Godel and Nicole Linden can get together and get Prokofy Neva banned from the game for 3 days for swearing in PG, due to their forum revenge desires, in a WA where a heated debate is going on about Anshe and the anti-Anshe campaign with boycott signs in the new continent, and can paralyze my business for 3 days and cause me loss of income as customers can’t reach me in game, tell me who is attacking business, hmmm? That’s to cite just one example of blatant misuse and collusion on the AR system in the game, by Lindens who are older players with networks, and older players with axes to grind from the forums.
“He went about it all wrong. Instead of addressing LL, or creating propositions and the like, he railed at individuals and accused them of all sorts of nefarious activity and motivations. His real issue is with LL, not other SLers who live withing the boundaries set forth by LL.”
As anyone can see, when appropriate, I criticized LL for creating this monster, and these sets of privileges, that led to the formation of an entrenched clique, particularly on the forums. I made a thorough-going, conceptualized critique, as I am doing right here in this thread, not engaging in some little personal jihad on few people with land disputes.
Some people would like to say this is just like high school or any other RL setting, with cliques and “the cool kids” and so on. Yes and no. The difference is that this is the formation of the Metaverse The difference is that it matters here to get it right if we expect to change things, and make the Metaverse something different that the Second Verse, Same as the First.
In this tactic, Nerferder hopes to rally readers here in defense of their beloved Linden Labs, creator of the game to which they are mainlained much of their 24/7. To which I can only rebut: my real issue is both with LL, especially forum mods and their superiors and policy makers, and forum posters, especially the FIC, who have perpetuated this intolerent, vicious world in which even newbies or non-English speakers are not spared.
“Worse yet, he engaged in activities which he himself railed against. He claimed one well known SLer was male, when in fact, it is well established that she is indeed a female. He claimed libel, while he libeled SLU/Snapzilla. There are several other examples of this type of hypocritical behavior.”
Another favourite Bolshevik propaganda tactic is to try to pick apart a person’s character, seizing on something that shows they are ostensibly a hypocrite. In this case, the story is twisted. The story occurs not on LL’s forums first, but on SLuniverse.com, BTW — interesting that little detail is left out, hmmm? And the story concerns someone who was widely, and evidently incorrectly, believed to be a male in drag in a female avatar — but I got the story wrong. I did not make what apparently turned out to be a false claim about their RL gender to shame them, to ridicule them (as is often done to me), to out them, or any of the kind. I merely misspoke, not realizing that this was wrong information. The minute I was told it was wrong, I withdrew it and did not repeat it (unlike all the forums jackals represented here, who continue to engage in this heinous act).
I continue to claim libel from SLUniverse.com because indeed libel did take place when several people continued to use the *wrong* RL to slander and discredit me with false charges of plagiarism. There was also the issue of Nolan Nash’s posted “interview,” i.e. a transcript of a convo that would have been a TOS violation in the LL setting, but was allowed and even encouraged on SLUNA.
That kind of deliberate, intentional, vicious, vindictive effort to a) out a person’s RL, b) use notecarded convos taken and published without consent and claim it is an “interview” c) libel them with the wrong RL — a campaign that most of the FIC members took up with great relish and glee and continue to indulge in even today — can HARDLY be compared to me, in good faith, accidently, referring to someone I thought was a male as an example of someone who wasn’t attacked in the game for doing this kind of crossover. HARDLY.
Any effort to make these things morally equivalent is simply immoral. I’d invite readers to look at Sluniverse.com’s forums to establish the difference between these two forms of expression, if they are having trouble grasping it. One effort is based on spite, hate, viciousness and an overweening sense of power and privilege. The other is a mistake, reversed, and only an accident — the mention of that particular person was not even necessary to make the point. If you don’t get the difference between these forms of expression, Walker, if you don’t get that my very long-winded rebuttals of the FIC are precisely necessitated due to their Bolshevik-like propaganda methods, then shame on you, you deserve your career in the bourgeois media : )
I’ll take this opportunity to note once again that in the TOS, and in Pathfinder’s interpretation established in the heat of the Nolan Nash affair, it was explained that IF SOMETHING IS NOT ON THE SECOND LIFE PROFILE IT IS NOT FAIR GAME FOR FORUMS COMMENTARY.
Yet FIC types like Jauani Wu (and now I have to reluctantly include him in the FIC now that I see how he behaves) believe that it they found out some RL information from Ingrid Ingersoll or someone else in the game who might have known me from TSO or some, and if they talk to me about this in the game and I befriend them and possibly share some RL info with them confidentially in the belief they are an adult and sophisticated person and reliable friend able to keep confidences and not behave like a dick, that’s not the same thing as publishing some RL information on my forum siggy or my in-world avatar profile, and doesn’t entitle to keep banging on the subject in the forums, or absolve them from a TOS offense, particularly *as a form of ridicule* which is all it is. Once you wise up and see this issue is merely deployed as a form of shaming, belittling, and harassment by people who can’t find other ways to shore up their own flagging self esteem, you see it for what it is. Walker? Ahem?
“I think that this is a big part of the reason LL decided to silence him. After multiple warnings and suspensions, including suspensions of 2 or 3 alt accounts, he would just thumb his nose at LL upon expiration of the respective suspensions and pick up right where he left off. He has no one to blame for that but himself. Simply put, poor impulse control.”
As I’ve amply explained to Lindens in personal forum messages, inworld conversations, and IMs, I did not thumb my nose at them, I did not dance around and skirt the TOS, I did not deliberately try to make them out to be fools.
*I merely acted because they failed to equally enforce their own TOS, I merely acted because they failed to act. The record shows that easily.*
I did one thing, and one thing only: defend myself from the outrageously egregious acts of slander, RL outing, and libel with the wrong RL which the FIC engaged in as their last resort to silence me, when their argumentation on the merits failed.
I returned on alts for one purpose: to try to rebut and derail the vicious campaign by SLuniverse.com posters to keep harassing me with the WRONG RL.
All of these gross violations of the TOS were ignored by the Lindens. They ignored them because they didn’t get ARs from me or anybody else — or got them way too late to make a difference. They ignored them because being new, when I first set out to make a full complaint with a full dossier of inworld messages, chat logs, and forums PMs, I sent it to the wrong authority (“abuse-manager@” instead of forcing it into 10 different ARs in the game and on the forums — which I would caution anyone to do, in fighting the FIC’s onslaughts, to make the system, as flawed as it is, approximate anything like a response.
That’s it. That’s the story. That’s my “motivations” that many seek to find in some conspiracy theory that I am a community-destroyer, falsely claiming I was booted from TSO or Stratics, when I am a member in good standing at both places.
Lindens failed to protect me from the monster they created on the forums. Some of them may have wanted to see me eaten alive because they themselves are FIC. Some of them knew it was wrong, that whatever my “offenses” in critical commentary on the forums, I didn’t deserve to have RL outing or RL slander (this latter issue continues to elude them, but that’s in part because they don’t get the symbiosis between their site and the third-party sites because taking a critical look at some a symbiosis would bring some uncomfortable home truths for them).
“I am not sure why this publication thinks that Prokofy deserves immunity from permanent forum banning. He was given ample chances to tone it down, and he simply refused to. This action would have been taken against any SLer who repeatedly violated the forum guidelines, most notably the “trolling” clause. I am quite sure he was warned of this possibility in the form of correspondence from LL.”
If defending your name against libel is trolling, then I am proud to be a troll. When Lindens fail to enact the TOS fairly, and you protest at that injustice, if that’s trolling, then I am proud to be a troll. “Trolling” is one of those nasty-little fanboy terms anyway, coming out of MMORPG hothouse boards culture, and really deserves some impartial scrutiny anyway, like most of the festering MMORPG culture that the fanboyz bring to SL. If you have to make negative commentary because there is negative phenomena in a community, that’s not trolling, that’s truth-telling.
It’s interesting that Nerferder is now referring to internal disciplinary matters saying he is “quite sure” of them — as if he has insider Linden knowledge, or is close friends with a Linden — blecth. One would like to think the Lindens had more integrity than that, but of course, we can’t really be that naive anymore after the IRC chat and Pathfinder (I guess I’m still hoping in some future perfect world, Pathfinder will explain to me why he did this in a way that really exonerates him.)
Fact of the matter is, in all their dealings with me, which sometimes resembly wild swings, the Lindens have not engaged in due process. I have notices of bannings with no forums posts linked to them to show the reason for the banning. My permanent banning notice is as short as they come, with no reference to any actual forums posts or even some kind of “trend” in forums postings with a word like “trolling” there’s merely a very vague term called “misuse of the forums”. When I prior to that had a 7-day ban ostensibly for coming back on alts, that was more about coming back on alts than trolling, and reflected a very incoherent and as-yet-imcomplete evolution of what we now see as the new draconian forums doctrine. When they used the word “trolling” in the 7-day warning, without any link to any actual offensive posts, one can only conclude that Cristiano and friends AR’d me on the posts about the sluniverse.com issues which are today “sequestered” and cannot be viewed by the public.
Thanks a lot, Cristiano! All your false proclamations that you are sorry I am banned, or that you are sorry my voice, as much as you disliked it, is gone. You were primarily responsible for my banning, and you know it : )
I stand by my statement that this site, Sluniverse.com, and other third-party sites related to SL harvest information and use it to block people — since both Uri and Cristiano have both temporarily blocked me from their forums in the past, they both know that they used my IP addresses to do this, so their constant denial of this practice, especially on Uri’s part, really don’t hold water. They can and do use IPs to block people. They view that as the normal course of affairs for any normal web site. I view it with apprehension as a vicious tool to create sanitized, gated communities free of necessary dissent.
“It’s also important to note that no precedent was set here. Prokofy was not the first, nor we he be the last to be banned from the forums. I know of two other persistent trolls that were perma-banned, and they hardly generated a ruckus at the level which Prokofy did. Prokofy has even engaged one of them over on SLU. How ironic. Two of the three biggest trolls in SL’s history engaged in virtual fisticuffs. Fitting in a sense.”
Um, since we’re not on the LL forums and have to be coy and coquettish here, I’m not sure why we can’t name the name of Angel Leviathan? I had never had any dealings with her until just through circumstances I became her neighbour. I think it’s very important to look at Angel’s behaviour in world, on Angel and her alts. She used all sorts of methods of harassment, including attacking innocents not directly involved in disputes merely because they were proximate, and violated the TOS in doing so as far as I can surmise. Her behaviour and ingame war tactics, which aren’t ones I use, can hardly be compared to my case. I have no idea what she posted on the forums, having not researched it, but people who randomly swoop and give negs even to innocent bystandards cannot be compared to me, who admisters negs with a clear-cut policy: if you slander me and publish false information about me on forums, I neg you.
“In closing, the majority of of people I have spoken to in SL about this banning feel it was well deserved, and most of them do not even participate on the forums. I think that this is very telling, and it reinforces my belief that LL was looking out for not only their own best interest, but that of their customer base as well.”
Another Bolshevik tactic — and one used by toothpaste manufacturers in the US as well LOL — is to say “4 out of 5 doctors recommend.” Nerferder might have 4 friends, of whom 3 supported the banning. Who is to know? I can only say that since my banning, I’ve received numerous IMs, inworld visits, emails, and PMs telling me of support, and opposition to my banning. Nerferder’s characterization of the world we live in, like much else of Nerferder’s claims, is false.
The FIC is in a war for the hearts of minds of the Lindens, and perhaps as a byproduct, the community of players of SL. They misunderstand and misrepresent the broad customer base and even LL’s intention. Their role on the historical stage of LL is waning. Let’s hope they can retreat more gracefully than they have been doing to date. I’ve already said in the forums — look again there if you missed it the first time.
http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=365773&postcount=8
Walker Spaight
Jun 22nd, 2005
Wow, that was a long one, Prok! For the record, and as you can see from the editorials here, I think you raise very important issues wrt the FIC, valid issues that people should be aware of, and I am sorry to see you banned from the forums, as I enjoyed your posts there. But I do think you’ve at times perceived attacks where there were none. I have no opinion of your RL state as regards anything at all.
My thanks to Nerferder were for the civil tone of his post, nothing more. I don’t want him silenced either, I just prefer everyone to stay focused on issues. Things are more interesting that way, at least to me.
Cocoanut
Jun 22nd, 2005
It’s not like high school.
It’s more like Lord of the Flies.
I wish, I wish, some grown-ups would come to the island and put an end to what is going on. Maybe then the kids would get the same sort of instant enlightenment when they realize what has happened there.
It’s not just Prok. It’s me, it’s anyone with the temerity to agree with Prok on anything or stick up for his right to express his views. It’s whoever’s next after Prok, after me, who dares to disagree with the tribe. Or, who dares to criticize the game, or the Lindens, in any manner.
There’s enough of them that it doesn’t matter what I say or where I say it, there are plenty to come in and disagree, while casting aspersions on my character and motivation at the same time – regardless of how harmless my post was.
With the draconian new rules, it’s not worth it. It’s one thing to have one’s reputation smeared and ruined by what Prok more accurately than I ever realized termed “the forum jackals.” It’s another to be driven from the game.
The forums are sick, real sick. It’s a turn-off to the whole game, and will be the downfall of the game.
coco
Kayla
Jun 22nd, 2005
You 2 are both crackers. It’s not LL’s job to suffer fruitcakes like yourselves. Just look at your posts.. one is about 67654 pages long and the other is another, one of many “nobody likes me, i’m going to eat some worms” reads. Get your acts together. Seriously, you’re both disgraceful. Shame on both of you for letting your personal issues lead you to offend and insult so many underserving folk.
nerferder
Jun 22nd, 2005
Why do I get the feeling I’ve read all this before? I suppose it because I have. Dozens of times. Repetition does not reality make, unless one is a closet fascist or worse yet, Stalinist.
I am certainly not going to point by point this remarkably long-winded reply from Prokofy, but I will touch on a couple of things that stick out like ravens in a flock of doves.
Kex & Nicole. I hear you accusing them of “setting you up”. I was unaware that they had invented a device which took control of your mind, mouth and voicebox. Surely this discovery will make them Lindenaires in short order.
Uri & Cristiano banning you. This is NOT IP harvesting. It is using a tool (logging) that is active on most of the servers in this world. This is why the logs exist, so that webmasters may block problem users. Hradly anything nefarious about that. Not to mention, as has been expounded upon innumerable times, all one can deduce from an IP number is the name of your ISP. I don’t know why you continue to harp on this. It really makes no sense.
SLU & you’re “outing” of Sensual’s “RL gender”. I see you are trying to excuse that by stating, “The story occurs not on LL’s forums first, but on SLuniverse.com, BTW – interesting that little detail is left out, hmmm? And the story concerns someone who was widely, and evidently incorrectly, believed to be a male in drag in a female avatar – but I got the story wrong.”
This notion that it was “widely believed” that Sensual is a man in drag, is complete hooey. I have been in SL about the same amount of time as has she, and share many of the same friends. I have NEVER heard this, so I am thinking it’s a fabricated excuse to try and remove yourself from a jam. That jam being being caught doing something you supposedly abhor. If you do in fact abhor it, it should not matter what the venue is, if this is about principle, which apparently it is not.
So I guess it’s safe to assume, that when you got all wound up about your RL gender being posted, it wasn’t on principle, it was only because of LL’s rules? Interesting. I see Coco subscribes to the same cop-out here on SLH, “this is not LL’s forums, Ardith”, with regard to her trying to out me. It should be noted that this is one of the things you accused SLH of doing, trying to out people’s alts. Why is it ok here on SLH, but not on SLU? Nerferder is, in essence, an alt. My alt. So, it’s ok for you two to out someone’s gender or alts (false info in both cases), as long as it’s not on LL’s forums. How interesting. I see, that in fact, it has nothing to do with priciple, and everything to do with using the instances in which these things were done to you, as weapons.
On trolling: I doubt that LL never mentioned trolling to you. When you were suspended, the Police Blotter clearly stated it was for “persistent trolling”.
On my “insider” info with regard to correspondence between yourself and LL: I have no such hotline. I’ve talked to 3 or 4 Lindens ever, and it was certainly not about other players. I am basing my suppostion on having seen how LL operates for a period going on 2 years. I am sure you were warned, probably more than once.
This will be my final post on this matter. Further belaboring this issue does no good whatsoever, as Prokofy views himself as beyond reproach.
Cocoanut
Jun 22nd, 2005
Ay-yi-yi – I have “insulted and offended so many deserving folks” now.
Right.
I’ve become a fruitcake, too!
coco
Prokofy Neva
Jun 22nd, 2005
OK, Walker, point-by-point lengthy rebuttals apparently are just something that don’t convince you, whatever. It’s a shame how the Internet and video games have eviscerated people’s ability to read, hmmm? And it forces one to write more and more to try to compensate, but that’s a losing battle, hmmm?
Let me try a different tack. This is about morality, Walker, and I address you, Walker, not just as you, the individual, Walker, but you, the Walker who represents “the intelligentsia,” “the educated class” and “journalists, the impartial ones” because it is to this class of people that any dissident turns to with their appeals, to try to win their heats and minds, to try to get them to see that the “estblishment” they sometimes unconsciously protect is part of the corrupt ancien regime that they need to disassociate from if they themselves are to have legitimacy in their craft.
Morality: issues of good and bad faith. To me, the cardinal manifestation of “bad faith” is to appear on this forum here under a pseudonym, not using even one’s already-anonymous SL avatar name. It means that one cannot take responsibility for one’s statements in-world or on-forums and ignobly hides behind a shield.
Another manifestation of “bad faith” is to harp about my alleged technical knowledge shortfalls on the IP and ISP issues (I can only refer you back to the forums and James Linden’s own excellent posts in the Hotline for a short course AND a long course of rebuttals to all THAT) — and yet — hypocrites! hypocrites! hypocrite! — to arrive at this site via an anonymizer, or to trust merely in Uri’s gentlemanly refusal to “out” you as having the same IP as some known avatar on the SL forums who may have posted here once.
If my critique of the sites of Uri and Cristiano regarding IP harvesting capacity is all bollocks, Nerferder, then why do you need to hide your identity?
(It’ll be interesting when the new “web on a prim” comes, eh? And Walker and Uri can sit in the Herald’s office in Louise, or wherever they sit, with a web-on-the-prim capacity to reach the Herald itself from inworld, and silently record, or not record, the IPs of all those people who cross their portals. Interesting, eh? I didn’t dare ask that question in full in the Town Hall yesterday (even the dissident Prok is mindful of the sort of thing that can start the process of separating oneself from one’s land in SL and eternal banishment). I did linger after the Town Hall to ask it of a couple of FIC tekkies, and to be honest, they were given pause, too. It’s not just Loony Prok who raises these very very VERY important issues of ethics and technology.)
So here is the cardinal bad-faith moment of someone arriving to this discussion anonymously AND possibly counting on the insidious IP-harvest machines never touching them because they use anonymizers, having a discussion with a person who has not only been de-anonymized, but viciously so, with all the horror of the Lord of the Flies in virtual format.
Then let’s look at another egregious “bad faith moment” which is also known as the Big Lie in the Soviet context. The Big Lie which Nerferder perpetrates on us here is that Prok was nasty on the forums, Prok attacked people individuallly, Prok personally called them “fucktards” (Pathfinder repeated this canard as well), Prok hurt their businesses, Prok harmed their reputations.
Was that easy to swallow, Walker? Why? Not a bit of it is true, by the way.
Let’s take the list of all those “harmed” — just for instance. Hank Ramos continues to handily extract his one percent of commission from all my rental boxes — oops damn there goes another $40 on a $4000 rental, ouch. Ack, somebody just paid 12 weeks OUCH. He steadily refuses to answer any emails about whether he will sell the non-comm version to free me from his [elided because I believe it suggests a RL crime in some states, but not South Dakota --Uri]. That’s OK, I now have another solution I’m working on (and anyone reading this who would also like to break free of the insidious SL rentomatic monopolies should contact me). Hank seems to be thriving, I’m not aware that the latest land crash affected anything he was doing adversely — I know me and my rentals empire is doing its part to keep Hank awash in commissions — and they do add up when there are dozens and dozens of tenants a week.
Let’s look at Nolan Nash, lying again on the forums, this time claiming “Ravenglass Management” tells tenants not to buy Weedy Herbst’s radios. Nothing of the kind. In fact, it’s the opposite, I recommend her radios for group land deeding all the time. Her radios are in my tenants’ homes. Nothing is amiss. Weedy’s Linden dollars continue to roll in, from my tenants due to my recommendation. Nolan, by the way, gets the attention for his prefab house in my ads, and tenants can rent it. No economic harm that any eye can see to any of these FIC regulars. Ditto Lordfly’s prefabs, which are rented, or even Ingrid’s which continue to serve in the Museum of Ingrid Ingersoll also known as my vacant rental lots still not rented — but because they are beautiful I continue to offer them. No economic harm that I can see *whatsoever* to this constant and vituperative anti-Prok poster.
Cristiano Midnight? What possible economic impact did Prok ever have on this Snapshot Baron? He continues to get a steady stream of screenshots and webhits, and the spillover to his various businesses and people he supports in game. Tekkies who follow the intricacies of IPs and stuff can just laugh like hyenas at Prok and non-tekkies don’t care about these things and keep uploading the Spaps. Was there any loss? Did anybody listen to Prok’s almost indecipherable mutterings about IPs? Hardly.
I could go on and on and on in the same vein. But I’ll spare you. I hope you understand what “good faith” means here. “Good faith” means I play fair. If someone has a business in SL that can supply my business, I use them as a supplier and I recommend them to tenants, regardless of the forums or even their negrates. Business is business. I recognize skill and talent, I give it my custom. I play fair.
Meanwhile, the FIC don’t play fair. Bad faith! Just look at the litany of harm perpetrated on my by the FIC, and by those seeking vengeance directly due to the forums:
o Three times in the last month, my group has been paralyzed by vicious, rogue “officer recalls”. These are attacks on me or other legitimate officers, who are either paying tier and purchase price or long-term leasers. These attacks are not about legitimate efforts to replace an officer who needs replacing (no officer paying tier and buying land should be replaced in a land group, duh), but about paralyzing the group. These have been done with increasing sophistication, and have cost me and dozens of tenants inconvenient, and made new ones turn away — real economic loss.
I know who one of them attacks was done by due to the alt who claimed responsibility — and it is directly tied to the forums.
o Some FIC members, especially newer players and content creators, have left my vendors, sometimes under demonstrable peer pressure from FIC, sometimes under actual physical attack, i.e. with swoopings and negs. It’s been a sight to behold. Imagine, leaving a cheap vending spot due to something you read on the forums, and pressure over something on the forums.
o My RL has been outed, without my consent, as a form of ridicule and an [suggestion of RL actionable activity elided --Uri] . I haven’t engaged in any kind of heinous anonymous attacks of that nature whatsoever. But I routinely receive them.
o I’ve been [legal term of art elided -- Uri] with the *wrong* RL, accused falsely of plagiarism — a [legal term of art elided --Uri] that many are still peddling and catching up on.
o Some content barons have placed aggressive signage on my properties (I’ve had 3 such separate instances) to harass me, advertise to my customers instead of their own (the signs face away from their buildings) and just generally make a nuisance of themselves.
o I’ve been attacked at an event by a loon wielding a vile replica of the World Trade Center, something I view as not FIC-directed, but FIC-enabled, not only due to the climate of impunity they established inworld and on-forums for attacks on me, but their inability to distinguish genuine freedom of expression and art from harmful incitement (in the Article 19 understanding) — those who arrogantly tell you we can’t have First Amendment, say, for Prok on the forums because it’s the Lindens’ private garden party are the first to claim First Amendment protections for this kind of crap.
o All day long, I get nasty IMs, “actions” by people who think they are being funny, event-griefing, spurious ARs, and numerous other forums of harassment, harassment dollar payments and harassment TPs, etc. In this context, it’s sometimes impossible to know what is a deliberate attack and what is an accident. For example, um, I’m going to assume that uh, the tenant who put out 1500 prims worth of Aimee Weber bears on a lot that could hold a quarter of that, thereby driving prim capacity off all the other tenants’ lots so they couldn’t place their houses, was just, uh, having a brain freeze.
Honestly, Walker, do you GET it yet? Do you see that the immeasurable, immeasurable harm done to me by these freaks far outways whatever “harm” I caused them by my “intemperate” critique of their power bastion? Do you not see, that to equate my writings with their writings in any act of moral equivalency is IMMORAL? Can you not see that?
And yet you feel the need, as patient as you are and as alive as you are to the principles at stake here, and as supportive as you are of my right to mount this critique, you feel the need to genuflect at least once in the direction of the FIC’s claim that my writings were “abusive” or “harmful”.
I’d like to see how you’d do, Walker, if your RL was outed without your consent, if you were [legal term of art elided --Uri] as a plagiarist because someone found the wrong RL, if you were continuously harassed in the game, if your business was harmed directly. How would YOU write then, Walker?
Imagine, Walker, if you went to meetings and you realized that Lindens and older players were laughing and whispering behind their backs because they thought you were a failed journalist, guilty of plagiarism. Can you imagine what that might make you feel like? Imagine if you, Walker, tried to disclaim that on the forums, got AR’d, got banned off the forum, then came back on the forum to try to right your good name using an alt — only to be told fuck off, you have no good name here, and PS, here’s an AR and P.P.S, here’s a 7-day ban?
TRY TO IMAGINE THAT WALKER!!!!!
The only way you can imagine that not happening is this:
it can’t happen to you because you don’t post, you don’t say what you think and you don’t try to fight the power. Is that any way to live?
Geez, even the Lindens did better than that. They would tell me point blank that my writings in fact were not TOS violations per se.
Now, honestly, Walker — and all you members of the intelligentsia and technocratia to whom I appeal — can you honestly continue to act in “bad faith” and stay on these forums? Is there honestly any reason why you are not WALKING OUT from them in single file, en masse? Can you not join Catherine Cotton at least in leaving General, and saying “I don’t want my land taken away over this.” Can you? Can you exercise that proper moral response to this highly immoral situation?
I know what I can do about this. I can go on “not living by the Lie” as Solzhenitsyn put it so well. I will not appeal to go back on these forums. To do so would be to ratify them in their present format, to ratify the very flawed “justice” system and the Abuse-Report system, and to endorse the evil connection between forum speech and total Second-Life banishment.
I refuse.
My only internal debate now is whether to appeal for pardon to King Philip, coupling such an executive pardon request with a request to repeal the new forums regulations linking forums banning with world bannings. My current position is leaning towards: no, it is not worth it.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 22nd, 2005
Just to state for the record, not to engage in any further polemics with Nerferder, who I view as in illegitimate interlocutor:
– Nerferder is harming someone’s privacy here further, when I did no such thing. I refuse to play that game. If I thought something was true, it was done in good faith, not in the nasty, conniving, manipulative manner in which Nerferder plays the forums game. I don’t perpetuate false statements — as Nerferder is doing now.
– The Lindens’ banning mentions trolling but provides no concrete post link to try to determine the merits of the charge — that’s the point there — poor definition of trolling, not some claim that it is not mentioned as a literal word.
– Kex and Nicole indeed set me up by doing a one-two punch in a PG zone — someday I’ll rehearse this laborious story in my blog or something, but it’s helpful to note that my very first offense in world, the very first time I ever did ANYTHING to get ANY Linden disciplinary actions WHATSOEVER is when I said “fuck you” in a PG zone. So for me to get not one, but TWO disciplinary actions on the *same* incident (double jeopardy) and to not get the normal step-through of first an informal warning, then an official warning or a “no action” but suddenly on the FIRST TIME an instant three-day ban from both the game and the forums (the forum ban illegally stretched to a 7-day ban ‘by accident’ without notification and required manual overturning) — well, you have to ask a lot of questions about that. Honestly, nobody plays this game and gets nailed for their first time on a thing like this without a set-up, trust me on this. It’s a clear abuse of power, and any bystander can see it.
Walker Spaight
Jun 22nd, 2005
Prok – I have never once claimed that your writings were abusive or harmful or intemperate, and in fact I’ve characterized the response to those writings as in some cases “vile.” I believe that was the word I used.
Journalism has various functions and often walks a pretty wavy line between advocacy and simply providing information (the myth of unbiased journalism), especially in a place like Second Life. I think the Herald does a pretty good job of both — and of tromping all over that line however we see fit in our effort to be always fairly unbalanced.
Ulrika Zugzwang
Jun 22nd, 2005
Oh yeah. I have a sweet sweet thread going in the General forum that’s been going for days without Prokofy taking a giant dump on it. It’s so nice to have the forums back! Hurrah.
V is for Victory.
~Ulrika~
Red Frank
Jun 23rd, 2005
Even with Prok’s testimony, i really can’t offer an opinion on his actions, but i gotta say that i hadn’t heard the TSO lamp-delivery bit, and as a member of one of the many *other* unimpowering mmorgs online, i think that lamp delivery thang is daggam BEAUTIFUL.
The whole tale is much muddied by the Lindens actions- they really walked right into this one, like a cream pie in the face, fulfilling Prokofy’s expectations of despotic nepotism… if i may use those words here… so back to the controversy of online gaming companies exerting thieir moral commandments.
Banned from the forums? what next? banning him from the game could result in global press coverage. @@
Joe Public
Jun 23rd, 2005
>>Banned from the forums? what next? banning him from the game could result in global press coverage. @@
I was quite neutral on all this but I find I’m starting to become slightly anti-prok. Can he/she write anything in less than 5000 words?
Why? Too much histronics, and I have this niggling feeling that maybe prok’s behaviour is all about building prok’s profile…maybe banning him/her would fulfill that ambition for publicity?
Isn’t it, in the final analysis, LL’s business to run SL anyway they damn well please?
RB
Jun 23rd, 2005
*jaw drops*
How any one person can write a blog comment that is 12 and half pages long is just incredible. Wow. lol.
*picks jaw up*
- RB.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 23rd, 2005
I know I write a lot, but it’s because for me, thinking, speaking, writing are all one language, not 3 separate languages as they are for most people. It’s a scroll like Jack Kerouac *shrugs*. Tune in, or don’t. I feel it’s important to create a solid record of a very important juncture in the history of SL at it’s 2nd-year anniversary point. I hope when I move over to my own blog I will be able to write shorter. I think one reason posts because long is because of the tendency to polemicize on a forums when you yourself aren’t writing the blog feature.
Walker, thank you for much for stating for the record “Prok – I have never once claimed that your writings were abusive or harmful or intemperate, and in fact I’ve characterized the response to those writings as in some cases “vile.” I believe that was the word I used.”
I take that to mean that you do not believe that my writings are abusive or harmful or intemperate. That’s extremely valuable. Of course, I don’t know how much you really read them. But since the “received wisdom” is this rampant, viral opinion that Prok was banned for “personal attacks” and “viciousness”, it’s important to see who really IS vicious on those forums. I appreciate you saying this, and I appreciate the SLH forum in my defense. I know I shouldn’t take things like that for granted, and I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me, but as you know, I do, that’s just how I am.
Where is the real viciousness on these forums? It’s in another place, not in my posts, and it’s still there, and it remains active and vigilant and ready to destroy the next person who comes along to challenge it. Let’s take but one fresh example, where I am falsely characterized as “disgraceful egotistical paranoid hypocrital insulting innuendo-laden motivation-distorting, even sometimes directly lying” — this from someone who together with like 3 alts ran a vituperative, hysterical, intense campaign against Anshe Chung’s straightforward inclusion of her new deeded island parcels on the land-for-sale list (something that was allowable, and something already flagged by the Lindens for change due to its possible misleading features — it was removed in the latest patch). This sort of “pot to kettle” kind of forums persona is all too prevalent.
I marvel with a kind of horror when I see the return of forums personalities claiming that the forums are “safe” now for “clean and fun and brilliant” discussions, when they are the same ones who heaped abuse, RL [elided by Uri] RL [elided by Uri], RL outing, etc. on me ad infinitum without a blink from the Lindens. It’s uncanny.
The forums really is like poison ivy, though. You really have to keep yourself from scratching the itch. It just spreads. Most of the people sitting and posting all day are non-entities, mediocrities who long since stopped creating anything interesting inworld, even if they once did, and still make money from it. If they are creators and doers and thinkers, they tend not to waste time on there. My mistake was spending the long sojourn I did among the mediocrities which only reduces me as a person and is beneath me. I continue still to find items of interest and people of interest new to me on the forums — they can still be used as a tip sheet to follow up more seriously in world. As such, it’s a hideous place, where hideous incidents of bad faith occur.
Kathmandu Gilman
Jun 23rd, 2005
I would say LL banned Prok simply to keep the peace. Many a thread has been abandoned in the forum once Prok chimed in and the complaints were getting louder. Since I rarely read the verbal diarria that is a typical Prok post I can’t say I agree or disagree since there is nothing about SL worth trudging through all the paranoid conspiracy retoric. It isn’t that important. Then again, no matter how sweet tempered the dog is, you keep poking it with a stick long enough, it will get angry and strike back and if you should lose a finger don’t blame the dog.
Prokofy Neva
Jun 24th, 2005
Kathmandu, it was William S. Burroughs who said, “Paranoia is having all the facts.” He is a figure I’m tending to identify more with these days. While many find my “rantings” t be “paranoid,” what’s astounded me as these debates have worn on, is that the facts tend more to bear out my complaints than not. The incident with Pathfinder in the IRC chat was one such set of facts, and the more I encounter FIC activists inworld and listen to them rant at me, the more I find I’ve probed a nerve here.
Uri, in your elision efforts, I need to provide you with the following guidance. Indeed, my RL information was outed on the forums. No one — Lindens, residents, enemies, friends — no one disputes this. A resident was publicly given an informal warning by Lindens for this and publicly apologized. So those are facts no one disputes. The Linden interpretation of the TOS on this, may I remind you, is that if a person has not put any RL details on their in-game Second Life avatar profile, it is not fair game for forums discussion. That’s all she wrote. And that’s all he wrote, too, so please be mindful of that fact on the ground.
Next, the other fact on the ground we have here is that in this process of outing my RL information, some particularly zealous forum jackals went on google witch-hunts. They found someone with a very similar name and other details to me, but not me, no relation, in another state. They picked up all the details of that poor unfortunate’s life, including charges of plagiariasm, and began bombarding me, SL forums, third-party sites with this false information, [elided by Uri] . You may chose to go on eliding my efforts to point this salient fact out — [elided by Uri] — but these are indisputed facts and even the parties involve admit — contact me inworld if you need additional links, etc.
I continue to face daily hits of RL outing, [elided by Uri] with the *wrong* RL, and ingame harassments and forums personal attacks.
Bubbles
Jun 24th, 2005
I feel sorry for the guy, but life is simply too short to read all his posts. In real life I spend my time having to paraphrase long winded reports at University so I’m sure as hell not doing it in my spare time.
By skimming his posts, I feel that his banning has proved many of his points. Watch the people who scorn his posts most. They make comments such as ‘I wasn’t aware that this was public knowledge yet’ or ‘wait until you see the features in the new version’ smugly showing that they do have inside knowledge!! Isn’t that what Prokofy is saying!?
montserrat
Jun 24th, 2005
prok has a right to speak independent of the good will of others.
prok has the right to make a fool of himself, if he wants.
what we are seeing here in my opinion, is another manifestation
of the board ho syndrome. prok is a board ho to the forums. so long as prok is driving eyes to the forum whether they are happy or unhappy, he is doing his job — he is doing what he, as a board ho,
has signed up to do. he is a big trader in the economy of attention.
in my opinion, the problem is with lindens, and again with terms of service agreements. terms of service agreements in my opinion come for the most part from the big scribery in wonderland. they embrace an assumption that they are exempt from the requirements that earthspace operates under. terms of service
agreements are totalitarian in outlook. there is no dignum and justum for the end user within terms of service agreements.
but yet, endusers celebrate their captivity to these agreements because they either have not read them or do not understand what they have read. endusers are collared to the lindens through the terms of service agreement. the wording in these documents is purposefully vague relative to endusers — and endusers, one would
think would have a very personal and real awareness of the fact that if they stopped creating businesses, content, relationships, bling, and empires, there would basically be *no* second life at all whatsoever. without endusers, second life is a large and magisterial empty land of glowing pixels. it is endusers who bring spirit and life to the land.
in my opinion, leading citizens of second life should go to lindens and say: we wish to negotiate a terms of service agreement that is respectful of users. a terms of service agreement that does not suggest the possibility of ridiculous terms like the term used to kick prok out.
prok can be a pain in the ass but he has a right to be that way if he wants to be that way. lots of his questions are good, and i, for one, enjoy butting heads with him even though he makes me rage more than a forest fire. at least with prok you know that there is some *there* there. & aimee what he said to you was *nothin* puhleeze be a big girl. if you are gonna play on a message board you have to grow a thicker skin. thinking is for grownups.
i say this in honor of mr sklar and mr neva:
LET RIGHT BE DONE
-montserrat snakeankle
montserrat
Jun 24th, 2005
and one other thing:
it ought to be clear even to a fool, just from reading the system
requirements for 2nd life that these people are elitists and that they like being elitists. so it should surprise nobody that lindens
create a culture that values exclusion.
Sheep Lady
Jun 25th, 2005
As I’ve said to you in world via IM, I like you Prokofy. I think many people are so quick to flock with the sheep or as they’re aptly named here the “FIC.” I agree with many things you have said and I see it too. I’ve witnessed certain members brag about knowing a Linden or a Linden’s alt. I’ve witnessed the sucking up as well. To all the sheep out there all I have to say to you is Baaaahh (You know, the noise a sheep makes).
jesse
Apr 22nd, 2008
This person quite possibly suffers from psychological trauma based on a childhood event.
Prokofy neva is violent and consistently so. This person attacks people and their character for seemingly no other reason than to create conflict.
Most likely this person needs the conflict in order to retain her feelings of victimization stemming from whatever psychological trauma she has suffered.
Apparently she is also the mother of a daughter.
Like the children in the Texas Poligamy compound, it is quite likely that this child is a child in need of services due to the violent nature of this parent.
I have been attacked personally, judged and physically threatened by this person based solely on one discussion regarding whether or not there is a human collective.
This person so vehemently refused to understand that there is a human collective, even simply by definition, as to seek to create conflict with me via personal attacks.
For a time I tended to play along in order to ascertain the extent of this person’s psychological imbalance.
At this point, I feel someone needs to look into the welfare of this person’s child. I am attempting to locate this person’s city of residence in order to forward this information to law enforcement and the Office of Family and Children.
At the very least, even if my assumptions are incorrect, I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed human. I feel sorry for this person.
Catherine Fitzpatrick (aka prokofy neva) just seems to have a bad rap on the internet, always the same, personal attacks and violence.
Here’s another example.
Prokofy Neva
Jan 29th, 2009
Good Lord, there’s one of the Twitter loons who has been abuse reported by more than just me for his violent and crazy attacks on Twitter. This unhinged personality threatened to come to my home and beat me up physically because I once criticized his collectivist ideological shilling on Twitter. You can find some really scary minds on Twitter — unhinged.
Imagine somebody so disliking your criticism of their bad ideas on Twitter that they would threaten to report you to the child protective services of your city as somehow a threat to your own children (!) and make up ridiculous stuff about your childhood and your real life.
Fortunately, any law-enforcement authorities who get this report would likely understand that what we are dealing with here is a broken personality that is mirroring the very problem they purport to find in others — and God help their own children.
Anonymous
Dec 17th, 2011
I cannot believe that anybody would solicit sympathy for such an emotionally damaged, mean spirited little malcontent as Prokofy Neva appears to be.
As for the banning from the Second Life forums all I can say is that since the forums are wholly owned by Linden Lab, the company has a perfect right to ban whom it will. Many would like to have seen LL make that ban permanent and even extend it to a permanent ban of Prokofy and all her ALTS from Second Life itself.
The point is moot however since Prok has been back on the forums for some time, spewing acid as usual. Some of her rantings would be hilarious if they were not so obviously products of a disordered personality in need of some serious therapy.
Though sympathy is misplaced, pity isn’t. So give the old lady a break. If Cathy wants to prove time and again that her mouth and her paranoia are both much bigger than her brain, let her. She’ll pay the price by becoming even more a pathetic, isolated object of ridicule than she is already. If that’s even possible.
An Idea
Dec 18th, 2011
My personal approach to the problem is to simply support the best type of practice and try to get others “on board”.
I even have to admit that it takes a lot of effort to figure out what the mental kinks and justifications are.
I think this is an attribute of leadership. To listen to people’s concerns, take them to heart, and synthesize your thought process into harmonious problem-solving.
Personally, it takes a lot of courage for a person to state an opinion. If the opinion is not reinforced with strong indications for an identity, then of course it is natural that anyone or any system designed to analyze the information will weigh it differently. So, personally, I think we have less to fear about libel and more to consider in regards to picking out fact from fiction. Effort is always appreciated and even if people are just starting to try to find their voice and gather their thoughts it is so much better for them to make an effort with their identities protected so that if they have obvious flaws or find writing hard, then these mistakes will not permanently affect them.
As I quickly scan the pages, I see concern, vindication, muddling various issues and topics together.
I have seen similar situations to those people post above and from what I know, I think we should respect her mental health and keep that information anonymous. We need to separate different types of issues from one another. I think a good way to summarize is this: When we feel concern about another person’s well-being, even if they are attacking us, what we must do is learn the skills required to listen to their problem, truly understand it and support them in the best manner we can.
I would love to talk more about such an issue, but I am currently studying my butt off (even on a weekday night >_<)
An Idea
Dec 18th, 2011
I meant weekend lol @that
An Idea
Dec 18th, 2011
feel so heavenly blessed I can study AND talk friends at the same time.
hobo kelly
Dec 18th, 2011
Being that it is the Holiday Season, the Crazy Cat Lady, if she really wanted to, could easily get a part time Seasonal Job so that her kids and cats won’t have to starve this Christmas and she won’t get Banned from SL again for non-payment of tier. Like over across the street at Bellevue I hear they need extra Greeters this time of year for all the Depressives, Schizo’s and Suicidals coming in through the doors. Poor, poor, hungry kitties, I get so RAGE just thinking about them starving, shriveling up, oh god…