I guess we disagree about your example. I see a (reverse) swastika as a symbol. If the context is nazi, I don’t care if it’s made out of Eggo waffles – it’s still offensive.

As for you bitterness at Linden Lab – I empathize as I’ve heard plenty of stories people losing inventory, land, etc, but regardless, if one person punches me in the face, I’m still going to be pissed off if someone else punches me in the face. I do remember Linden Lab’s Wednesday Hurricanes, as we called them. It was 2004 – 2005 and their product was still de facto Beta.

RE: The museum – you completely miss my point. If I go to a WWII museum, any nazi symbology is in *context* – I expect it there. My example was on the street in public – where it’s not only not expected, but not desired. And you’re right and also slightly wrong about the roots of the symbol. The Indian swastika is generally counter-clockwise, and the nazi one is always clockwise. It’s also fairly apparently when something is part of hate speech versus in context of Indian art or religious symbols. Again, *context*.

I shouldn’t have to mute people. Second Life, to become widely popular, needs to work more like the Internet. Needs to feel more like the Internet. When I surf Amazon.com, I don’t expect to find nazi comments when I look up a book. I need to go out of my way to head to a more loosely-government site (let’s say, 4chan), to encounter that. I don’t go to basic websites and get griefed.

I suspect the root of why you view this differently is based on one simple word. “Players”. You consider Second Life a game in the way you express this. The context you’ve set is one more similar to Call of Duty, where I might expect some 14 year old ninny to be swearing nazi anti-gay expletives because I got a lucky shot on him. I see Second Life as the Internet, where there are “users” or “visitors”. Ultimately, this is a completely different discussion, and at the moment, it’s best I simple point this out at least so you (and others) understand that there’s this larger idea that may be the root of the differences in our opinions.

RE: Prok – Again, citing an extreme doesn’t prove a point about a common person.

Thanks for the rationale discussion though – it’s much appreciated!

That what you call a false dichotomy, I call a matter of perspective. There is not a single thing that they can do to my SL experience, that LL itself hasn’t fucked up already in the past, present and probably future.

Anyone remember the weekly updating process that included shutting down all of LL’s servers, booting everyone out for hours, in some cases, a whole day, on end?

and your RL example of someone showing you a nazi flag… If that gets you up in arms, better stay away from any and all WW2 musea.
A swastika in and by itself, shouldnt offend anyone. It’s an Indian peace symbol after all… The ideas behind the nazi swastika, is what people should be offended about.

When I say it’s not the end of the world, I mean the following: you can just mute them, and go about your buisness as if they were never there. And the sooner new players learn that, the better their SL experience will be. and we all know what griefers want, a reaction, any reaction. If muted, you can simply rob them of that, and they will go elsewhere.

Im not saying it’s all cool, and nice, and perfect, but really it is hardly the hyoooge problem people are making it out to be. Look at Prok if you need the perfect example of what NOT to do.

Indeed, you just spewed the rationalization of griefers. “It’s not the end of the world” and “it doesn’t really hurt anyone”. The first, of course, is a false dichotomy – just because the world isn’t ending doesn’t mean something isn’t bad. The second is a matter of perspective. If someone walked up to me on the street in the physical world and held up a nazi flag in my face, I’m certain any reasonable person would agree that would be unacceptable behavior.

But more importantly, anyone who attempts to play off nazi symbology as harmless “livening up” is not someone who is going to be taken seriously by many people, and I think you nullified any chances of your arguments being worth anything by saying that you laugh at swastika griefing.

I’ve come to the opinion however, that it’s the people that do the griefing and trolling, that keep it entertaining. Somehow they never learn that a spongebab or lemon party screaming cube is something everyone has seen by now, and simply doesnt have the shock effect it used to.

I still laugh to myself when I think back to the American flag swastika they built on our dancefloor, thinking a couple of dutch furfags would give a flying shit XD

Being griefed is not the end of the world, and the sooner ppl realize that (some never will, granted…) the sooner they will ignore it and go on with their second lives. While I dont applaud it, griefing is part of the SL experience, and it might as well be introduced to the new players at the earliest (in)convenience.

It cant do any harm after all, and as Argo said, it livens the place up a bit. I do the same, hang around the welcome areas in the hopes of seeing someone hop around thinking their afro/awesomeface/mudkips is the coolest thing ever. (or whichever meme is popular today, I havent been lurking in a long while now)

One is that things are in different places. Regardless of the quality of the new UI, we have to relearn how we do things.

The other is that the new UI is a lousy design, starting at the basic level of the colour scheme. And while people are starting to devise a way of changing the skin, some things we seem to be stuck with.

Why can’t a program use documented OS calls to match the user’s basic preferences for text and background colours? I’ve had better control of colour and contrast in MS-DOS programs, written more than twenty years ago.

So I wonder what the alternative is… definitely another 64-million-dollar question

And ra ra rasputin, in this industry, people like you are valuable, because they’re rare exceptions!