W-Hats Visit Reuters
by Pixeleen Mistral on 17/10/06 at 3:11 pm
Goons with talking hand puppets
by Fiend Ludwig
Plastic Duck returns – as a hand-puppet?
Prokofy Neva is not making up his accounts of relentless harassment, as related in his comments to the Herald here and on his Second Thoughts blog. This morning I witnessed just such a confrontation on the Reuters sim – with alarming hints at what the latest griefing tools may do.
While visiting to check out what Reuters had to offer, I had just finished speaking with Adam Reuters, and was playing with the News HUD when Prokofy teleported in and said “Hey” to me. Although familiar with his writing, we had never met, so I was looking forward to a spontaneous chat about the entrée in SL of the world’s largest news agency.
SL avatar hand-puppeteering
However, four avatars – complete with a couple of chatty and quasi-sentient ‘Grid Crasher’ hand-puppets named Plastic Duck and Disco Duck – rezzed in right behind him and launched a steady barrage of verbal spam before I could say more than “Hey Prok – how are you?”. Keystone Bouchard, architect and author of The Arch, was also present and had even less chance to speak to Prok than I.
Surround-sound chat harassment?
Reader – decide for yourself if this is abuse, and ask, “Would I like to be subjected to this type of behavior every time I log into SL?” Here is an unedited excerpt of the chat:
Prokofy Neva: Hey Fiend
You: Hey Prok – how are you
Adam Reuters: hi prokofy
Baba Yamamoto: I found Borkrn
Plastic Duck: where are we who’s this
Prokofy Neva: Good
Zombified Irwin: Heya Prokofy
Disco Duck: Hi Prok
Borkrn Partch: Hi Prokofy
Howie Lament: who built this nice reuters building?
Prokofy Neva: Oh Jesus
Borkrn Partch: Hello
Prokofy Neva: It’s the idiots from W-Hat
Zombified Irwin: I resent that
Borkrn Partch: Baba isn’t from W-Hat stop spreading lies
You: i shall document their harrasment
Disco Duck: I haven’t been in w-hat for over a year.
Prokofy Neva: Borkrn stop joining my group, each time you do that I AR you for crashing the grid which happens 5 minutes later DUH
Zombified Irwin: Harrasment? really now we said hello.
Borkrn Partch: (Baba don’t tell her about your W-Hat ties)
Prokofy Neva: It’s “he”
Baba Yamamoto: i dont even have an SA account
Prokofy Neva: and duh I know about them DER
Borkrn Partch: Why are you making DUH and DER sounds
Disco Duck: Borkrn stop crashing the grid that’s my job
Plastic Duck: Shut up Disco it’s my job
Prokofy Neva: news hos
Borkrn Partch: Oh goodie ARs
Zombified Irwin: You know you really need to grow a sense of huour
Borkrn Partch: Can I be reported for something hilarious this time
Zombified Irwin: *humour
Zombified Irwin: You should check out the w-hat burger
Zombified Irwin: I hear they make good frenchfries
Borkrn Partch: ‘today Borkrn stood next to me and talked it was creepy please ban’
Prokofy Neva: Try out one of those Baba, that’s what your friends are crashing the grid with now
You: prok – this must get excessively tiresome
Prokofy Neva: it automatically terraforms everything around it, it’s very creepy
Zombified Irwin: Borkn and Zombified are plastic duck alts both of them
Prokofy Neva: well yeah
You: prok – this must get excessively tiresome!
Prokofy Neva: gosh d’ya think? who knew? go know!
Prokofy Neva: Hi Keystone
Zombified Irwin: Hey now this is only the second time i’ve met Prok in world
Borkrn Partch: Wow I didn’t know I could teraform land I didn’t own now
Prokofy Neva: say that was a marathon session yesterday
Disco Duck: I watch you whilst you sleep
Prokofy Neva: yeah WOW
Keystone Bouchard: Hi Prokofy =)
Prokofy Neva: an exploit WOW
Borkrn Partch: You must discover all the exploits Prok
Prokofy Neva: Baba test it out, I’ve never seen anything like it
Prokofy Neva: spreads devastation all over the sim
Borkrn Partch: Okay which object are you talking about I’ll give it to Baba
Prokofy Neva: forces all the objects to return on it by sending them off world
Prokofy Neva: I gave it to him already
Prokofy Neva: and you know full well which object
Keystone Bouchard: Sure was! I couldn’t sleep last nigh t=)
Prokofy Neva: which has your trademark cut-off furry head thing on it
Zombified Irwin: Wait what
Borkrn Partch: What trademark
Prokofy Neva: I think there are 4 notecards or 5
Prokofy Neva: I fell asleep trying to copy them all
Borkrn Partch: Do I have a trademark now
Prokofy Neva: You have an M.O.
Prokofy Neva: attention ho
Prokofy Neva: this is all feeding them
Prokofy Neva: but let’s take down all their names to AR
Borkrn Partch: I’m hungry
Keystone Bouchard: rofl
Prokofy Neva: I see Howie, and Zombified
Disco Duck: Bolshevick tactics
Prokofy Neva: this is like Romper Room
Plastic Duck: vicious psychotics
Prokofy Neva: Fiend are you in on it?
Borkrn Partch: Yeah Fiend is a huge griefer
Zombified Irwin: Stop crashing the grid Fiend
Borkrn Partch: Fiend you stood next to Prokofy now you get banned
And for the record, I am not a griefer, nor a grid crasher, but I did stand by Prokofy.
Baba
Oct 17th, 2006
I’m not a griefer, I only enable them.
Baba
Oct 17th, 2006
I had to read it because my name was in it
Howie Lament
Oct 17th, 2006
Awesome, i’m an internet celebrity! Hello internet friends!
I guess Prokofy hates me now that we’ve been within 10 meters of each other. Sorry, Prokofy!
Prokofy Neva
Oct 17th, 2006
Thanks for standing by me, Fiend. It’s funny, this seemed so routine, I wouldn’t even have abuse-reported it. I mean, if you wish to stand in the Reuters lobby with a Plastic Duck puppet that quacks about crashing the grid, well, that’s not actionable, correct? It’s just um….art? Sorta like those old Kukla, Fran, and Ollie shows we used to see on TV?
In time, even the uber liberal Reuters will figure out that they need to ban these WA-type griefers for constantly disrupting people’s meetings and efforts to chat normally.
Routine…But of course, it gets wearisome when this bunch trails around me like black flies in June, crashing events, barging into my sims — and worst of all — bothering tenants. That’s really over the top. Tenants who have nothing to do with anything, merely tenants.
Each day, Borkrn Partch joins Ravenglass Rentals, a group on open, to annoy me. No doubt he’s hunting for “share with group” objects to exploit. He leaves prims on my land, as all their alts do with really um secretive names like “Grief Ball”. Things like “Plastic Duck Edutainment Center,” a “hilarious” slide show of things like ‘Hey, Kids! Let’s Crash the Grid Using Shared Group Objects!” sort of thing.
Making a bust of me using my RL picture and then defacing it, well that was the worst. Creepy.
I’m glad someone other than me is noticing it, reporting on it, expressing that it is wrong.
These are the people that Baba and Huns give a pass to. It’s their “plausible deniability”. They let this bunch do the griefing while they can pretend they aren’t TOS violators. They can abet and aid and comfort them without ever getting their hands dirty. It’s really despicable. Glad you caught them at it.
It really discredits the lib secondlife project that these v-5/w-hat griefers are in the group. They claim to have moved to some kind of two-tiered roles now within the group, where some can join on open but others get invitations. Still, their presence discredits the entire group. I don’t know why Lindens remain in such a group.
Baba
Oct 17th, 2006
They stay in the group because libSLers get tons of chicks
Zombified Irwin
Oct 18th, 2006
Really now this is blowing something silly out of proportion. Like I said, this is the only second time i’ve ever seen Prok inworld, and we didn’t purposely ‘teleport in’ to her, we were in the sim beforehand. The entire exchange took one minute then Prokofy walked away and we left her alone.
As usual though, Prok goes on an insane rant and proclaims us all as the same people who are crashing the grid, destroying residents homes and constantly harrassing her daily. Sure we joke about it alot (who doesn’t like attention) but really now, if you can’t see the humour in a silly exchange with a plastic duck handpuppet there is something seriously wrong with you.
Huns Valens
Oct 18th, 2006
I’m amused that you think I’m some kind of central coordinator for all griefing in Second Life.
Kerian Bunin
Oct 18th, 2006
I was in Reuters like all day and I missed this
Fiend Ludwig
Oct 18th, 2006
To Zombieifed Irwin – you and your colleagues were not in the Reuters sim before Prok arrived. I was there for about 10 minutes before this event, chatting with Adam Reuters and exploring the sim. I have a gadget reports avatars in the same sim as me, and you were not reported, nor were you any of you indicated by the tell-tale green dots on the mini-map I had open in my HUD for the entire visit.
Zombified Irwin
Oct 18th, 2006
Then your object clearly doesn’t work, or you just weren’t watching it. We were standing on top of the roof in the corner of the sim talking to Baba and a few other residents when Prok came in. Borkn noticed the arrival of a few new notable people such as Adam and Prok so we all ventured there to check out what was going on. That’s the truth, no matter how much you want to spin it out of context.
Prokofy Neva
Oct 18th, 2006
Fiend, you may find yourself endlessly in a word-salad marathon with these creeps (see the numerous backing and forthing between Major Senior and myself in the comments on Pixeleen’s story about Satyr’s forced closure). This is how they do it, as you can see — they endlessly literalize, parse, distract, obfuscate — and bald-face lie.
These people are the alts of the other people who used to harass me — their M.O.s, speech patterns, spellings are all the same. But of course they always have that old “plausible deniability”.
These are malicious intelligences at work, of varying degrees of skill.
Baba acts pretend-aghast at the concept of griefers *gasp* getting into libsecondlife *gasp* and claims he has nothing to do with these people, but then gosh, gee whiz, there he is ganging around with them on the Reuters sim.
It’s possible they came on the sim by themselves, to harangue people there like they do other venues, such as a recent community round table where they were out in full force, and it is also quite possible they stalked me. We’ll never know, will we? I’m told by Lindens that god-mode, that resident-scripted thingie that enabled god-mode, no longer works. I await confirmation of that. I suspect it doesn’t. Why? Because I’ve suddenly been treated to a rash of 0-day newbies lately coming up and force-friending me. Because I often have a string of a dozen IMs going from customers all over, some wanting to be friends so they can find me regarding rentals, my default is usually to accept friendship requestsj. But of course, I then double back later and see, whoops, some of “my new friends” are being banned for griefing by my tenants themselves, or I see them in the company of these creeps, or I figure out from their other groups what they’re up to. So one of these force-friends is the conduit through which they stalk me.
Huns Valen is indeed a central apologist for these people, his centralized, avid, apologist activities are their best organizing and recruiting support out there. When Huns can bring himself not only to denounce, but disassociate himself, from this activity from groups he supports tacitly and below the radar, or through actual appearances at victory dances and such, then we might find credible his protestations that he is uninvolved.
Kerian Bunin
Oct 18th, 2006
Prok, god mode no longer works, nor does the menu even exist. It was replaced by the client and server menu, and the show on map feature doesnt work for residents. People probably find you because it isn’t hard to work out where you might be.
I was in Reuters off and on all day, and they were there early as well. Fiends device would almost positively use a sensor which is limited to 96m so just because they didn’t show on that sensor device doesnt mean they wern’t there. Honestly I fail to see how someone talking with hand puppets is newsworthy.
Much ado about nothing.
Huns Valens
Oct 20th, 2006
Prokofy,
You say that I need to denounce people and actions. Actually I do not. I don’t need to prove anything to people who think I’m some kind of griefing magnate. For one thing, I seriously doubt that there are many people who believe that in the first place. For another, if they do, it will only be because they have listened to second, third, and fourth hand accounts from people with at least partially unknown motivations.
If someone reaches a conclusion from an essentially thoughtless path, such as stupidly believing what the Prokofy Nevas of the world have to say without investigating matters for themselves, then their opinions, built of nothing but habit and laziness, are not worth taking seriously.
I bite my thumb at thee.
Prokofy Neva
Oct 21st, 2006
Well, gosh, Huns, wrong-o.
Your friends Borkrn Partch and Zombified Irwin are now *gone* from the People List.
I doubt it was because I abuse-reported Borkrn a dozen times for various petty forms of harassment — how could I prove he was a grid-crasher?
I didn’t even abuse-report them for this harassment at Reuters, since I figured, well, if somebody wants to stand around the Reuters sim, which I view as a public commons since they created a public discussion area, and make the public discussion be about Plastic Duck hand-puppets talking about grid-crashing, well, who am I to judge free speech, eh?
Yet, they’re gone from the list. No thanks to you! Imagine that!
There’s no thoughtless path; there is you as a griefing “magnate” and “magnet” too. You apologize for people who are banned…for cause. And not on my say-so.