Comments on: The Rock Spider Clan of Second Life

By: WTF?

WTF? — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 19:21:01 +0000

yeah a rock spider is a term for a rock climber who climbs light without safety equipment here.

@alyx I wonder if LL paid back any money spent by those accounts? Kinda chicken shit to offer a name then punish a person for using it.

By: Alyx Stoklitsky

Alyx Stoklitsky — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:49:18 +0000

All avatars with the name Rockspider have now been removed.

One wonders what LL said to the account holders – or if they said anything atall.

By: Bamika Easterman

Bamika Easterman — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 04:43:40 +0000

Doing a search today it looks like the Rockspider clan is gone at last. There’s only one left, created on 9/17. I must say that it took LL longer than I thought it would to do this. From a PR point of view they should have fixed this one like “Yesterday!”

By: Archie Lukas

Archie Lukas — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:28:44 +0000

I have unlicensed DDT (Gallons of the stuff)

call me, I’ll pop over and poison them

FoC

By: Ari Blackthorne

Ari Blackthorne — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:18:16 +0000

“Noun
rock spider (plural rock spiders)
Australian prison slang for a pedophile/child molester. Rock spiders constitute the lowest rung of inmates in the prison system, and are looked down on (and often mistreated) by all other inmates.
A term used to refer to Boers (Afrikaners) by Rhodesians and English-speaking South Africans.”

I am American.
NOT Australian. Or South African

Like the Lindens, I’ve heard the term as referenced to mountain racing. Not as an *Australian* slang word.

Hurray for the Germans who are familiar with the term. I am willing to bet you wouldn’t have been have your government just gotten the hell out of your lives and would stop trying to protect you from yourselves.

Like the idiots in the United Sates… and Brittain… and OH! The whole damned E.U. ‘entity’. Now *there’s* a beast of burden that never should have been born! LOL

By: Emperor Norton Hears a Who?

Emperor Norton Hears a Who? — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:23:26 +0000

and we need trolls with this stuff?

By: General Drama

General Drama — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:29:32 +0000

Not surprising. Back when Germany came out of the dark ages and started giving everybody last names, they’d assign surnames to jews like “Einhorn” which was a euphemism for “dick head”, along with similarly abusive names.

By: Senban Babii

Senban Babii — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:19:38 +0000

Melissa I agree; everything can be given a sexually twisted meaning (for some reason I’m now laughing at the scene in Friends where Joey does just that with “Grandma’s chicken salad”).

But while it’s true that even every day words can have sexual connotations, a quick search by Linden Lab to filter out terms potentially or clearly linked to paedophilia (and perhaps other areas) would take ten minutes tops and would avoid potentially embarrassing situations like this one.

By: Melissa Yeuxdoux

Melissa Yeuxdoux — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:39:55 +0000

This American never heard of a “rock spider” before this brouhaha arose. (There’s a rockspiderracing.com; apparently they race vehicles up steep rocky inclines.)

I looked up the first word that came to mind, “mustard”, on urbandictionary.com. It has an entry with a sexual connotation.

“Faire les yeux doux”, whence comes my last name in SL, means “to look amorously” at someone or something. The occasional Francophone asks me “do you know what your last name means?” Yes, I do.

Just about anything has risque or offensive connotations if you go looking hard enough. Some are obvious, and LL can and should skip those, but past that seems wasted effort to me. On one hand, people not wanting to give offense can put forth due diligence; on the other, people that DO want to give offense can always pick a first name or combination of first and last name that does so.

By: Bunny Brickworks

Bunny Brickworks — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 03:24:46 +0000

I’m German, not a monoglot though :p And even here the meaning of the word ‘rock spider’ is quite well-known due to some attempts of the government trying to censor every last bit of the internet. So much about the glorious English skills of our British neighbours…

But back to the subject. The first time I met someone called Rockspider in SL, I was immediately reminded of the double meaning of the word and checked the person’s profile. And I was not surprised to see groups that perfectly matched the name – ‘family love’ and something similar to ‘little chicks for daddy’.

Of course, we can’t expect Linden Lab to double or triple check every name but running a google search or entering it into the Urban Dictionary would seem appropriate in the light of the Lab’s desperate attempts to keep the grid clean and perfectly legal. Then again it took a dozen abuse reports to have the account of a person called Rapist Childs banned. They are a loving and caring bunch those Lindens, aren’t they?