Real criminals are the ones who engage in non-approved speech. Such as me, for daring to talk back to Linden favorites regarding their clear and documented hostility and sexual harrasment. Those who break (unwritten) speech rules don’t even even get to see the Cornfield.

Apparently someone who points out the obvious regarding a Linden favorite is a much more dangerous sort than your average griefer, grid-crasher, hacker, or cheater.

Tell ya what – any game that makes a criminal out of someone as straight-arrow as I am – well, it just tells me that being a criminal in SL is a GOOD thing to be.

Being a criminal myself also makes me care very little anymore about the ones who decide to crash the grid or do other crimes, interestingly enough. I used to care about things like that a lot.

I consider that a very interesting phenomenon. I’ve never before identified with the criminal element at all.

The Herald ought to pay more attention to free speech issues in SL, and to the horrendous things that happen to people in a climate of favoritism, pecking order, and different rules for different people.

But then – Uri isn’t here any more, and I haven’t noticed the Herald caring much about free speech issues, or even fair justice issues, since. Guess y’all got bigger, cooler – or more likely, just easier – fish to fry. ones that don’t require looking too deeply into anything or rocking any important boats.

coco

I also find it tremendously annoying that two kids in law school can get on what is a game for themselves and announce with great fanfare that they are making a “Superior Court” and get all kinds of media coverage, and even get the Lindens to do a smackdown and make them rename themselves even less pretentiously *cough* Metaverse Superior Court” and then…never take a case, or hear a single session. I bet like a lot of enterprises in SL of great pitch and motion, they simply got tired of playing, didn’t like paying tier, and building was too hard, plus they had papers due. And so thousands of people are deprived of a mechanism for justice.

Ever after, they get media coverage for doing that, they get the glory for their resumes, they get to use it to get themselves hired, while they accomplished exactly 0 for the virtual world. Shame on them.

I found that the reporter in question (who has also written a story in Dazed and Confused magazine on Second Life) tends to embelish things a bit (not too much, just enough to make the story sound better, but still. Besides, she me one reporter that does not lol). My quotes I don’t remember saying them exactly like that (for example I know how to spell Consigliere). He is a freelance writer and not a writer for New Scientist themselves. It only took him long time to come out with the completed story and Discover came out well after he had interviewed me about this so it was already in the works at that time with NS.

Marsellus Wallace
Boss, The Sim Mafia
http://www.thesimmafia.com

From the NS article: “‘What a mind-numbingly futile exercise,’ Tony Walsh wrote on a Second Life bulletin board. ‘So now we have yet another level of tedious bureaucracy to Second Life.’” Couple of things here–
1) The “Second Life bulletin board” is, in fact, the Herald. My comment was in response to a Herald article on the Second Life Superior Court.
2) The author of the NS article truncated my quote without putting an ellipsis at the end. The complete sentence was more interesting than the truncated one, and showed that I felt the court wouldn’t have any teeth to back up a judgement. The author says that “Others wondered” about this same issue (which may be true, but I wrote about it in the very line they truncated).

I’m nitpicking here, but I don’t like the way author changed or neglected the facts, however trivial the facts, the changes, or omissions. Nobody contacted me to fact-check what I wrote (I’m not even hard to reach), and the Herald should have been cited by name. Boo, New Scientist.

Also, how did I out my gf in the story Walker? lol Me and Mackenzie are no longer married in the game anyway (still together in rl though). She is not a fan of the press coverage or Mafia stuff that I participate in.

Marsellus Wallace
Boss, The Sim Mafia
http://www.thesimmafia.com