But hearing that I’m a pain in *your* ass, Prok … well, I suppose I can’t fault you for bringing me only bad news.

As for your “all wet” comments – The original thread about the event linked to radio open source’s website, and that website does list where you can listen on both satellite and terrestrial radio. This means it’s a typical example of you criticizing things without doing any research whatsoever. This means your comments really didn’t affect availability of the URL. How much more plain does Hank have to be with “Check your local public radio station to see if they carry Radio Open Source.”?

The Devil himself might make the best damn cherry pie in the entire universe, but I wouldn’t know because I’d never buy one. I don’t care how hungy I am, how good that cherry pie is, or how big of a smile he has on his face. I’m still not buying that pie, and I’ll do my best to make sure noone I know buys one either.

This ESC/FIC bunch is just a devil of another sort trying to make it so they are the only supplier of cherry pie in SL.

When someone in SL goes out of their way to treat me like crap (usually someone I scarcely knew existed, much less ever did anything to), I gotta tell you I do NOT buy their products, nor do I recommend them to others.

I generally try not to do this at first. I mean, the person could have had a bad day or year or something. Not long ago Moopf got it off his chest that he thought I was an “interfering busybody,” which I suppose a resident of SL with thoughts on SL must be, especially if they are female.

I had a meditating flower you can sit on Moopf made, that is both adorable and low-priced. I often have people visit me while I work, so I went and bought two more of these, and sent him a note saying I couldn’t resist his wonderful product, even though I had said I would, after he said what he did. I was hoping that it had just been a bad day for him, and that underneath it all he was an okay guy.

This resulted in an exchange where I continued being friendly, and seeing if he wouldn’t maybe melt out of his hostility. But – he just continued being a total ass. Even said, “Well, some people stick to their principles; too bad you don’t,” about me buying more of his flowers (and trying to be friendly with him).

So, somewhat sorrowfully, I put those flowers in my garage sale.

I had had one in-world exchange with him before, that he probably didn’t even remember, where I asked him something about one of his scripts. I eventually got back a rather terse answer. I was the customer!

I ask you, Prok, why help people in their business when they obviously don’t care how they treat their customers? They probably view this snottiness as being principled; I view it as being a pig.

The world is big enough so that a person can find another flower or whatever, or make it themselves, or commision one made. No need to promote ANYONE who can’t act civilized, however good their product may be.

I wouldn’t do it in real life; why should I do it in SL, where it seems to be incredibly common? It astounds me that people in SL can be so arrogant as to treat their customers in this fashion.

coco

Going to the parcel — which I finally achieved after about a dozen attempts to teleport in (I finally walked in) — a good 30 minutes went by while everyone fumbled stupidly with all the kewl technological stuff trying to get it to work. There were more than one FIC asshole types bleating that “Prok is finally learning” when they could tell I finally got the sound working (it’s not rocket science to pull up Itunes and press “forward” duh) because I started helpfully typing one-phrase summaries of the speakers like a translator for those who STILL didn’t have their sound working — and the transcript readily shows that many of us only intermittantly got the thing to work.

“Anybody” can paste a radio into their parcel when “Somebody” stops being an asshole long enough to *publish the fucking URL* (which Hank thoughtfully did when I reminded him). “Somebody” can get the fucking controls to work while present in the inworld event IF the goddamn thing works, and I can’t imagine that the SIC plugged-in-technically-savvy Gwyn L would have been listening to the thing outside her game instead of inside if it DID work der.

Goddamn, Hiro, you such a fucking PAIN IN THE ASS, and you know, it’s up to me to regularly tell you that loudly and clearly because even the people you work with THINK this but don’t say it, and it’s a public-interest task that needs doing. Honestly, ESC should put me on the payroll as a 1099 just to perform this urgently-needed social task at least once a week.

One, about the podcasts, there’s something terribly geeky and sad about them, yeah. You have only to see the macho geeky posts of Maxx Monde to come listen to his pod cast on some site of his with some hip name like Juice Box to realize…the sadness of it all, yeah. Listening to what has been dubbed the FIC Power Hour is also a window into the terribly geeky and sad thing they have. I really got a huge laugh out of the way Cristiano’s voice sounds on the FIC Power Hour, all cynical and nastily-edged and urbane and know-it-all in the small pond of SL, and how the tone completely changed (think: Eddie Haskell!) when he had to talk to RL people in the Real World and tell us all terribly sincerely about how he rescued some guy from RL suicide once in SL.

I’m reminded of plastic-pocket-protector geek boys in what we used to call the Audio-Visual Club in 9th grade, expertly working the controls on the 16m projector, snickering and lording it over the rest of us because of the special me-time they got to have with Mr. Rogers, who was probably groping them in the AV closet LOL.

Uri had this expression about sitting in on a conference at this game conference SXSW recently, talking about Virtual Entrepreneurs. He said something like, well, we’re a year away from this now at least…”it’s a lonely little circle-jerk here on the bleeding edge…”

The podcasts have exactly that feel of the lonely little circle jerk. In fact, the SLA wickedly funny satire of the Power Hour this week with the headline “Johnny Ming Gets a Chubby,” go read it at http://forums.secondserver.com link somewhere, sorry, can’t find it right now.

Rats! FIC plans foiled again!

http://www.radioopensource.org/living-in-game-space/

Seeth, I have a list of every single “official” FIC. They do exist! And they are usually the only people that deny thier existance. Secret hand shake, sad, loser, suck up, Linden worshiping/cock sucking, crappy society wanna be’s.

I can’t imagine advocating the boycotting of a business of another person in Second Life. Why? That would be cruel and unusual punishment. Bad behaviour should be punished by the Lindens, not the society at large — it’s all we have for a government. And expression of contempt for bad behaviour should go in the forum of negrates (too bad we no longer have them) or in free forums where opinions can be freely expressed.

I realize the whole little juvenile guild/clique system thrives on this idea that this or that prim-a-donna is going to get all her little friends to blackball you, but I don’t buy it and won’t abide by it. Business is business. It’s one of the things that keep the fabric of a free society as woven as it is, and trying to do product boycotts over a political disagreement is wrong.

I personally don’t have any burning need to have crossed swords on my back like Hiro and other little fanboyz imitating Snowcrash, but if a newbie asks me where to get crossed swords, or I’m doing some kind of SL orientation, of course I’d say “Oh, you get those at Hiro’s” just like I have Weedy Herbst’s radio in my list of recommended radios, even though she herself has behaved ilke a vicious junkyard dog in her treatment of me.

I am baffled, when I read other articles about this event today, why the Herald, Gwyn, or SOMEBODY just didn’t get us this American *public radio’s* URL so that we could at least listen without having to get a repeater from the FIC. Jeez. The answer isn’t just to create other closed cliques blocking them, however.

The rare case where I could imagine a boycott for overriding hugely important matters of national interest might involve something like the Bush Guy. If Lazarus Divine made widgets, I’d advocate not buying those widgets, to try to hit him in the pocketbook the way he has financially harmed hundreds of people in SL by devaluing their land, forcing them into liquidation or shelving of their land. I personally have lost months of rentals income on property due to his extortionist land griefing practice.

I believe very strongly in consumer rights and consumer advocacy. When we have a patently unworkable, hard-to-use and often incompletely distributed and poorly served item like the infamous CrystalShard TV, I believe in strong, vocal freedback and creating lists of recommended TVs and lists of non-recommended TVs. That’s just common sense. And I feel it worked — the features/documentation are better on that product now. Why should I and my customers spend hours in the queue to Flipper, Pol, and Crystal trying to get service on their inadequately resourced, explained, and therefore non-working TV? (which was merely designed to pull the rug out from under others charging money for the script who in fact created business and billed for their time — something none of these FIC types were willing to do.)

No matter that, sure, after 30 minutes of fiddling, the best technical minds of SL could finally get the Freeview thing working, so that one can say “it works” (I often get it working lately by shutting in on and off a few times, just like the quick and dirty solution for most technical things many of us have to use in RL.) That’s not a consumer-friendly product.

That’s not a call for a boycott, however (and the thing is free anyway). CrystalShard has many useful things that people buy and gain efficiency from, like that Rez Foo thing that I highly recommend to builders. Flipper’s SLBoutique is useful for many people and they get sales there — it’s a must for any orientation. They may all be assholes, but if their products work, or fill a niche or a need, or a demonstrably the superior products in their field, why would you persecute these individuals or cause them harm with a stupid-ass consumer boycott?

Hiro Pendragon, for example, takes credit for my permabanning. Let’s just hypothesize for a moment that this is true (it’s not lol). I could theorize that Hiro has caused me so much psychological and even economic damage by this permabanning thing that I should try to inflict equal and opposite damage to him in the economy.

Well, no. This is an example of when I believe the only hope for this world is that the free market, and liberal capitalism as a philosophy, can prevail, in taking off the rough edges of things like electronic latter-day Leninism and creator-fascism. If we treat these creator-fascists in the same way they treat us — boycotting us, whispering about us to their friends — I feel we as a society are doomed.

It’s often been pointed out that young men who emigrate from say, various Islamofascist societies or Central Asian dictatorships who come to the U.S. and get a business going or drive a taxi or find other forms of enterprise, humble or great, don’t tend to follow the extremist ideologies that make them likely to throw bombs in their own country or abroad. Prosperity does tend to dilute radical ideologies. Whereas those who go to say, France, and get put on welfare and not assimilated, tend to incline more to the extremist ideologies that might make them bomb stuff.

In the same way, it’s my hope that a robust, free society with the free flow of capital, goods, services, information, and people, will tame the technocratic electro-Leninists and the creator fascists into something more tolerable in SL : )

Horse pockey of the rankest kind!

Then why is that these things always involve the same people saying the same thing over and over. “How can we (the FIC) get more residents to pump their $L into our pockets, and shut the other people out?”

Perhaps this is why I don’t buy anything that has their stink on it. I don’t shop on SLboutique, and I encourage my friends not to either. I don’t purchase anything made by anyone in this group.

The whole name bugs the crap out of me. Electric Sheep Company indeed. Quite appropriate since they consider us the sheep and themselves as the shepards.

This constant closed door crap doesn’t help them either, and neither does the “oh by the way we had a public meeting here’s the transcript” mentality they have either.

Let’s take the lamb to the slaughter and boycott the ESC!!