But now the botty rash has healed and I’ve managed to escape from Real Life, I just have to salute George on that wonderful paragraph, which makes me feel OK with being a “priggish twatwaffle” if my article can stimulate such splendid prose. I wish I’d written that description!

This above quoted text is so detailed that I can only but assume that Boy George is speaking from personal experience.

In other news, Sigmund The E-monster is still a priggish twatwaffle!

Pssssst George: “Ad Hominems” are what you call an attack in the middle of a debate, not just a general attack. Don’t worry, you’ll learn about that when you get to junior high.

But look at you! Using such big boy words! You’re so ahead!

Would you like to know the difference between the two?

In one world, Linden Lab (or us,) could pull the plug at any moment and everything you’ve worked so hard for is instantly gone forever.

In the REAL world, you are a mom’s basement-dwelling neckbeard that wears a giant cum-stained carpet sewn vaguely into the shape of an animal and a bedsheet wrapped about you like a diaper while you sit on a virtual game wanking it to virtual people because you’re too unappealing for any other human being to get within 50 feet of your presence.

Meanwhile, we trolls enjoy quite active social lives and are contributing, productive members of society, and that pisses you off because we are what you could and will never be.

And now you know, AND KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE!

*** GI JOEEEEEEEE ***

I’m not the only person to experience this, though of course others’ mileage may vary. I don’t see SL as being that fundamentally different from email or IM, in that regard.

Then again, part of the complaining about “getting a life”, IMHO, has to do with a broad array of social miscues, of which include the op/ed in question.

Frankly, I consider the poor health effects of second life usage to be doing a public service. By causing all the emofags and drama queens in SL to have such terrible physical shape, their risk of cardiovascular related diseases, diabetes, and other health issues related to grossly morbid obesity is greatly increased, thus helping to ensure that as many of them as possible die as possible, and the rest become so ungainly and/or asocial that they will never reproduce.

Ergo, Second Life is Evolution In Action, by removing people from the gene pool who are of substandard genetic stock (ethnicity being entirely irrelevant here, epic fail knows no skin color). Being oh so srs bsns about harassing people to ‘get a real life’ therefore is anti-evolutionary and does a disservice to the human race. The best thing that griefers and others on the ‘its a game’ and ‘get a life’ mantras can do is to STFU and let these people go to hell in their own self selected manner of making real life safer for the rest of us.

Ivo Meads and others have their definition of what constitutes having “a life”. Note that Ivo’s definition doesn’t preclude playing SL, so telling SL users to “get a life” (whether you insert “real” or not) is just stupid based on that definition. There’s no reason to assume SL users don’t have “a real life”. It would be doubly stupid to suggest SL isn’t a part of it, any more than golf or football isn’t a part of a lot of healthy people’s lives. Part of a healthy life is finding time to do what you enjoy (regardless of whether others would enjoy it or not). Playing SL may very well be an important part of “getting a life” for them.

My own definition of having “a life” would preclude giving a rats ass what Ivo’s definition is, or anyone else’s. Everyone has a life, but not everyone chooses to live their own life their own way. When you live by someone else’s standard, that’s the closest thing there is to not having a life, because you don’t have a life of your own. Everyone is different, and has different goals. What is success for one person is abject failure for another. No one can judge whether you’re succeeding in life or not without knowing you intimately well.

Thus, no one tells anyone else to “get a life” unless they’re stupid. If they know the person they’re talking to well enough, they can offer much more specific advice on how they can achieve their goals. And if they don’t know the person well enough, they’d be stupid to think they can even tell whether that person has one or not, or how successfully they’re living it. Thus, saying “get a life” to someone else is a sure tip-off that the speaker just doesn’t have a clue.