… After being snubbed for years by groups that didn’t want him, and finding his weak rental business model beginning to flounder in the face of rising competition in the SL business environment, Prokofy decided to finally gain vengeance upon those he felt had looked down upon him for too long. He had tried many times logging in as various alts and griefing the system, trying to frame those he despised. Sometimes he would even log into forums under false names to support his long rants and to build support for the downfall of the evil Lindens and their pets the LibSL, but to no avail.

He had been jealously watching the evil libsecondlife with a close eye for some time now, and through his network of paid spies he had finally found the perfect tool to complete his plans. Second Life had been slowly slipping away from his control, and he needed something to sway the tide and raise himself to a respected controlling status against the Lindens.

LibSL it seems had been designing a tool which could reproduce the data stream that was sent to the client and return it to the server. Prokofy realized this was his chance, and that with a very simply modification, he could create a doomsday weapon to bring Second Life to its knees. Meanwhile, he had been securing his financial future by developing a defense against his ultimate weapon. He knew about all the demos going on for the new LibSL technology, so he timed it perfectly. He unleashed CopyBot under one of his many alts and then made windfall profits under other alts selling the CopyBot Assassin. All the while, he furthered his agenda of keeping SL a closed system where he could forever be the most powerful, and where the possibility of an Open Source technology to benefit all would never exist.
!

Takes a special effort to surpass the borg.

- RB.

bwahahahhhhahahahahahhaha….that’s the funniest line I’ve heard in ages. The list of “accomplishments” prok itemises in his *sniff* acceptance speech is even funnier.

“I will continue to fight for the integrity of one’s avatar, and the preferred gender of one’s avatar, and the firewall protection between one’s avatar and one’s real life person. These principles must be at the bedrock of the Metaverse. They must prevail. blah blah blah”

oh…puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease get a fucking life!!!

It seems funny that the site has been down for days all the time this “Avatar of the Year” article ran — then it got pushed below the fold. I couldn’t come in and comment. Paranoid? Yes mauahahahah.

Seriously, I am relieved you didn’t select Lazarus Divine, who arguable affected more people — people who probably never heard of me, the forums, the Herald, even, with all due respect.

I receive this honour with mixed feelings. After all, it is the Herald that outed my real life without my consent more than a year ago, and made it possible for roaring psycho stalkers like Nolan Nash and his many fake alts on my blog and this blog to keep persecuting me. The fact that the Herald keeps ducking this issue, never really facing it, is just part of the Herald’s story that will probably have to be told by someone other than the authors of “Only a Game”.

Uri *does* harvest IPs and *does* use them to keep people off. These charges are *true*. He twice banned me one evening after the Selena Witch hoax when he was furious at me — I tried coming back on another ISP and he got me there. He then relented and unbanned me, realizing how bad it would look for Mr. Champion of Free Speech to be banning someone who hoaxed him and exposed his shoddy journalism.

Since then, Uri’s journalism has gotten better, and of course he’s hired people like Walker who are professionals, so that’s great.

Urizenus, in writing this chapter and using the chapter to pay me (lefthanded) tribute, makes a number of profoundly misleading statements.

The first is the concept, fueled only on the forums but not backed by facts, that I was banned for accusing Cristiano of harvesting IPs and saying “they track you all over the Internet” about sluniverse.com

In fact, I wasn’t banned for such statements, it happened merely that the thread was “sequested” to be “examined” by the moderators (a funny practice they engaged in for awhile) and then never returned. The erased thread simply said Cristiano harvests IPs and uses them to ban people. He does! Just like Uri! And just like Prok — in requesting that people use their SL names if they wish to post on his blog. As you all have constantly proven, and is widely known, this is accepted practice. The question is whether you use these banning tools to chill speech or hide unpleasant truths, etc. I don’t see that the Herald does this. I don’t do that as I leave up all these haters and asstards to harass me constantly. Cristiano may or may not block posts, who knows? He certainly had me blocked for awhile.

As I’ve often explained about this incident, none other than Robin Linden herself entered this thread and said she’d check on the issue of how email addresses entrusted in privacy to LL, were going off to Snapzilla, an outside third-party, as part of the “from” address in the “e-mail my screenshot” function. I was right to question this. Cristiano only defensively says that he “dumps” these email addresses. But if they land on his property like that, that’s wrong. We’d have to entrust him to cut them out. Meanwhile Linden has a lot of explaining to do when they promise privacy, promise no spam, yet let your e-mail travel off its site so readily (there are at least 3 other mistakes they’ve made on this matter we’ve all documented and it illustrates their callous careless with this issue, which they only belatedly began to fix).

By linking to his original “The Second Coming of Dyerbrook,” Urizenus does nothing to correct the falsehoods in that story. The story claims I “hounded Will Wright from his own game.” I doubt Will Wright even knows or remembers who I am. To be sure, I had an alt that befriended his alt in TSO a long time ago, but *if* Will Wright were to remember Dyerbrook and his alts in TSO, it would not be with any notion of being “hounded”. He disentangled himself from TSO of his own accord, due to his creative differences with Ea.com or whatever. I don’t know all the politics and behind the scenes stories there — couldn’t the Herald cover this? –but it’s simply false to say “I hounded him from his game” in the role-playing war between Sim Shadow Government and the Lightsavers Partisan Liberation Movement LOL.

P.S. I remain a member in good standing at TSO, I was never banned from TSO, and the 3-day ban equivalent of a swear in PG is a one-time instance that many people had on their records and means nothing.

Of course restating these corrections for the record for the millionth time is unlikely to stick; I find these days that even if I say that I shed two tiers and sold off two sims and pay less tier to LL (because of their competition with their own residents), then some fuckwad will transmogrify that on to some hysterical blog comment that I “received two free tiers from Linden Lab”. So it’s hopeless LOL.

If I were to describe my accomplishments in SL, they wouldn’t hinge only on bringing LL to account with things like the Pathfinder IRC story. They’d include:

1. Leading the charge to get rid of the pernicious officer-recall function which enabled any anonymous griefer not only to paralyze a land group and its business and customers and tenants, but to even take over with rogue elections after freezing that officer they wished to grief and target. LL got rid of it. Of course, in doing so, they put in something else — the right of the founder to call LL and ask them to remove any officer who might have joined originally in good faith. So it’s got terrible repercussions of state intervention, but this is all a stop-gap til they fix group tools, which I hope they do sooner, and not break some good aspects of it even as they fix it.

2. Created a medium-sized rentals company that has more than a dozen communities, some of them with themed builds, where people have fairly simple and lax rules to build on their own while respecting their neighbours, and share in group benefits like extra prims with the 10 percent bonus and group dwell. I’ve pushed for the tier-sharing/tier-donation program in the fact of huge opposition from major land barons who loathe the idea of grassroots organizations of this type that would give them less dependent, and less high-paying customers.

3. I made it possible for many people to break through the cartels near telehubs by providing low cost parcels or stalls without the forced 4-week payment that many land-barons installed to make windfall profits off these areas.

4. I led the effort to create Metaverse Justice Watch and other similar groups, whatever their dramas and hijackings later, to help launch the era of interest-group lobbying in SL, a normal function of a civil society that is vital for a democracy.

5. I put 50,000 m2 into the SL Public Land Preserve I started to create a variety of lands to enjoy for wilderness camping to spas to no-rent vending.

None of these things are very sexy in terms of the Herald, but I think they are an important part of my story.

I continue to maintain that this horribly conservative, stuff, arrogant, and unfree society of SL needs to have dissidents — dissidents that keep their integrity, and are willing to endure campaigns of hatred and vilification, for the sake of broader freedoms in the world. By introducing the terms “FIC” and “tekkie-wiki” and “fuck-you hedonism” among others, I have changed the lexicon significantly and helped people to think about the problems inherent in a revolutionary project that involves a game company steeped in MMORPEG culture feting and privileging and even hiring more than a third of its own customers to govern something they say is a world in its own right.

I do want to point out again that I am Prokofy and Prokofy is he. I will continue to fight for the integrity of one’s avatar, and the preferred gender of one’s avatar, and the firewall protection between one’s avatar and one’s real life person. These principles must be at the bedrock of the Metaverse. They must prevail. No one has the right to destroy another’s second life or avatar by harming them with outing in an effort to silence, shame, or humiliate them. No one should be intolerant of another’s transformation of gender and should respect that choice and cease their taunting and teasing by calling them with the opposite gender’s pronoun.

If a person cannot change their gender and cannot make a Second Life; if they cannot criticize the programmers, coders, and designers of that Second Life software for the sake of a better world than our first world, then there is no Metaverse, there is only a game.