Second Life residents in some select groups like SLDev were alarmed this morning to discover that in addition to nerfing traffic, and pitting residents against each other to police their “avatar rendering costs,” the Lindens are planning on instituting a system to flag objectionable content on SL parcels via search results.

In a note to the SLDev list read mainly by scripters and developers of the open-sourced viewer, Jeska Linden informed select residents that they could expect soon a system to abuse-report undesirable or illegal content on parcels turning up under search results. Several list members objected, saying that such automatic systems would lead to abuse.

In a comment for the record on the LL Traffic Future list, prominent SL educator Fleep Tuque said, “I think my biggest concern is that, yes, the immediate take down can be used maliciously. There is an appeal process in the outline, but for time sensitive events, that wouldn’t be adequate.” Argent Stonecutter, a long-time RL network administrator and SL scripter, said that residents had asked for tools to report spam, not analyze content.

Below the fold, the full text of the communication.

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 2 May 2008 20:58:07 -0400
From: “Brandon Lockaby”
Subject: Re: [sldev] Your Feedback Wanted on Search Flagging !
To: sldev@lists.secondlife.com
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”iso-8859-1″

I think you’ve got the wrong idea with the “automatic” part.

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 8:08 PM, Jeska Dzwigalski
wrote:

> Heya,
>
> Thanks for all the great thoughts everyone, very helpful! I wanted to
> clarify that the Search Flagging described is for search listings — not
> inworld content, avatar or group profiles, land sales etc. – it is ONLY for
> parcel listings, classified ads and events listings. Also, for those who are
> concerned about abuse/griefing, here is some more detail on the proposed
> design:
>
> * If a listing is flagged as “Mature” by x Residents and is not marked
> Mature, it will be automatically changed to Mature – it will not be removed.
> Totally agree that more clarity is needed around what is “mature” (and
> “prohibited”) I will take that back to the Governance Team as feedback.
> * If a listing is flagged as “Prohibited” by x Residents, it will be
> automatically taken down and reviewed by the Governance team. Prohibited
> listings might include listings for gambling or child pornography.
> * Not all accounts are able to flag search listings, anonymous basic
> Residents or Residents who are under x days old will not be able to
> participate in search flagging.
> * Each account which can flag is only able do so once per search listing
> and there is a limit to the amount of search listings each account can flag
> per day.
> * One account flagging a listing will NOT cause it to be automatically
> removed
> * Nominate for Showcase is that exactly – a nomination for review by an
> editorial board for possible inclusion.
> * Any classified ads that are taken down will be refunded (prorated for
> time active), with notification
>
> Are there any other restrictions to who can flag or when/how/etc anyone
> can think of to help both prevent overt abuse while still helping stem
> grievous abuse of search listings (see: current Event Calendar spam as one
> example)?
>
> Cheers,
> Jeska
>
>
>
>
> Innes McLeod wrote:
>
> I have some reservations about this system. It seems to me that, as has
> been mentioned, it can be abused to harass. To prevent it’s use as
> harassment, you will have to add load to the database to record where every
> vote came from. The same will apply to the Showcase nominations. I can
> foresee hundreds of alts being created just for the sole purpose of voting
> up a single business.
>
> As it stands even with that system, if I see something that I feel is a
> serious offense I would still send a normal AR, instead of waiting for
> enough people to notice and hopefully cast their votes for the removal of
> the offending content. Generally, I only report for very obvious hate
> speech, or child related sexual material, and in my opinion both of those
> are to important to just have them sit waiting for enough votes.
>
> Something I would rather see would be an expansion of the categories that
> products or parcels can be listed under.
>
> Original Message
> *From:* Jeska Dzwigalski
> *To:* sldev@lists.secondlife.com
> *Sent:* Friday, May 02, 2008 12:35 PM
> *Subject:* [sldev] Your Feedback Wanted on Search Flagging !
>
> Hello!
>
> You’ve been asking us to do better with inappropriate content and content
> classification and we’ve been listening. In an effort to make our abuse
> reporting system easier to access and more effective, we are planning to
> introduce a flagging system for our search results – and we’d love to get
> your feedback.
>
> The new flagging system will help Residents to flag inappropriate postings
> for rapid removal, while preserving everyone’s ability to express themselves
> freely in world.
>
> *How it will work*
>
> – First, when you post a classified, group, event or parcel listing,
> you will have to self-declare if your content is mature or not.
> – Second, every listing will have a “Flag This” link. You can use
> this to report inappropriate or mis-classified content or nominate great
> content for the showcase.
>
> *Flag Categories*
>
> – Mature – *the listing is adult only content*
> – Prohibited – *the listing contains content that is prohibited on
> SL*
> – Spam – *irrelevant listings (examples: commercial posts in
> non-commercial venues, event postings for non-events)*
> – Showcase – *nominate something for possible inclusion in the
> Second Life Showcase* (http://secondlife.com/showcase)
>
> *[All listings will still have to follow the Community Standardsand Terms
> of Service .]*
>
> *Types of listings that can be flagged*
>
> – Parcel listings
> – Classifieds
> – Events
> – You will not be able to flag avatar or group profiles
>
> *What happens when something is flagged*
>
> – Every flag counts as one vote for that flag category. While one
> (or few) votes does nothing, if a listing receives enough votes in that
> category, it will be auto-classified as reported.
> – Prohibited and spam content will be taken down immediately when it
> gets enough votes
> – When content is flagged several times, the content owner will be
> notified by SL support team and may be penalized according to Community
> Standards
>
> *Anything else?*
>
> – Residents will be allowed to flag a particular search listing only
> once. You cannot change your vote, so flag with care
> – There will be a limit to how many times a day a Resident can flag
> search listings
> – Anonymous basic residents or residents whose accounts are less
> than x days old will not be able to flag content
> – Residents will still be able to report abusive content from
> inworld via the Abuse Reporting system under the Help menu
> – Of course, no system can be perfect, so if you think something
> was flagged in error, you can always file a support ticket for review
>
> Thats it. We hope that this will make content flagging more effective and
> will help the community better regulate what is appropriate and what is not.
>
> Please reply to this email with your thoughts and feedback on this
> proposed design!
>
> Cheers,
> Jeska, Kalpana and the LL Search Team
>
> –
> —-
> Jeska Dzwigalski
> Community and Product Development, Linden
Labjeska@lindenlab.comhttp://www.secondlife.com
> Visit my Office in Second Life: http://tinyurl.com/nmhsa
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Click here to unsubscribe or manage your list subscription:
> https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sldev
>
>
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG.
> Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 269.23.7/1411 – Release Date:
5/2/2008
> 8:02 AM
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Click here to unsubscribe or manage your list
subscription:https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sldev
>
>
> –
> —-
> Jeska Dzwigalski
> Community and Product Development, Linden
Labjeska@lindenlab.comhttp://www.secondlife.com
> Visit my Office in Second Life: http://tinyurl.com/nmhsa
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Click here to unsubscribe or manage your list subscription:
> https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sldev
>
>
—- next part —-
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Message: 3
Date: Fri, 2 May 2008 21:00:36 -0500
From: Argent Stonecutter
Subject: Re: [sldev] Your Feedback Wanted on Search Flagging !
To: Jeska Dzwigalski
Cc: sldev@lists.secondlife.com
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

On 2008-05-02, at 12:35, Jeska Dzwigalski wrote:
> You’ve been asking us to do better with inappropriate content and
> content classification and we’ve been listening. In an effort to
> make our abuse reporting system easier to access and more
> effective, we are planning to introduce a flagging system for our
> search results – and we’d love to get your feedback.

My feedback, as a 20 year network administrator who has at times been
at the forefront of the anti-spam effort in Usenet and email, is:

1. I have not been asking you to do better with “inappropriate
content and content classification”, I have been asking that you make
it easier to report spam. Spam is a content-free concept: the content
of a message is almost irrelevant as to whether it is spam or not.

2. “this is spam” should be the only option. Any other categorization
is too open to abuse and is likely to cause you a lot of extra work,
as well as cause unrecoverable damages to innocent parties. At least
that’s what’s happened in other environments.

Message: 4
Date: Fri, 2 May 2008 21:03:30 -0500
From: Argent Stonecutter
Subject: Re: [sldev] Google Summer of Code 2008 update
To: SL-Dev Mailing List
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

On 2008-05-02, at 14:46, Anna Gulaev wrote:
> I always thought it’d be a good half-solution to allow builders to
> define a volume (a prim) as “indoor space”. So, you’d place a few
> large prims inside your building to roughly fill the space
> (including the interior wall surfaces, but not the exterior), make
> them fully transparent, flag them as “interior volume”, and any
> surface that was fully within one of those volumes would not
> receive sun/moon lighting or any local lighting that originated
> outside the volume.

Only if these prims were guaranteed to never under any circumstances
able to be selected unless you have BOTH “show transparent” and “edit
mode” on. Trust me, it’s swingingely hard to interact with ANYTHING
when you’re inside a prim.

_______________________________________________
SLDev mailing list
SLDev@lists.secondlife.com
https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sldev

End of SLDev Digest, Vol 17, Issue 8
************************************

By Prokofy Neva, Kremlindenologist

today 26 groups – tomorrow – 513?

Our game-gods imposed a curious kind of metaversal democracy on us yesterday, in their accidental wisdom, creating a ginormous entity called “Concierge Party Group” inworld with 6,926 members.

Wait. Make that 6,727. Because the chat in this absolutely outsized Second Life Tier Nation drove at least 199 people instantly absolutely batty and they bailed.

MJ Linden put up a dirt-simple group charter: “Do not spam the group.” That never works on socializers in Second Life, however; one resident’s pithy sayings are another resident’s spam.

Blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight of a code-dictated mass movement, Concierge Party Group members immediately came to a very stark realization: the Lindens had violated Nature in two basic ways that they said could Never Be Done.

The first thing they did was make this the 26th group. 26th! How can you have 26 groups!!! In every office hour, on every JIRA comment, at every real-life meet up in the back of the bar, the Lindens have told us that we can never never never ever never ever ever ever never have more than 25 groups. Because. It would be too many calls to the data base. Yet…here they made one at the drop of a party hat.

The next thing they did was mass-invite people into this group — no, mass join them into the group so that upon log-on, they showed as as already members, without having to fumble with the wonky interface. Wow! Some land barons were saying, “Hey, I want that. How did they do that?” One button — instant mass audience or customer mailing list.

Something tells me the Lindens didn’t have to pay $100 to make this group, either.

But there was more…

It didn’t take the first member of Concierge Party Nation long to figure out that the voting tools worked! MJ Linden, unlike many controlling and fussy rape role-players and land barons who make groups, hadn’t figured out how to turn off the voting tool for the “everyone category” and just leave it for the officers.

And with good reason. As anyone with an inworld group of more than 1 person, let along 750, can tell you, what inevitably happens is that even with screening, some nit will post a vote, rather than a message (it used to be that was the only way to leave messages in the group), or they will put up a retarded referendum like “Did I fart?” which will have that exact effect even in a non-olfactorious world, because it forces numerous hapless group members, upon log-in, to have to bat away a drop-down blue-menu voting screen.

Proposition 1 of this new democracy, however wasn’t a spam, but a very urgent civic issue:

“I propose that we don’t get auto-invited”

A good deal of discussion went up about the sense of invasion people felt, being frog-marched into a group by Linden-run switches — and of course you couldn’t leave this roach motel because you had to have the group tag on to gain entrance to the party island on Saturday. That meant 4-5 long days of chat in a group with…well, it was down to 6,724 now, but let’s say there’s a LOT of chat in this group!

Proposition 2 wasn’t long in coming:

“Shut the fuck up.”

Proposition 1, having been found wanting by some expert JIRAhdists, soon morphed into Proposition 3:

“I propose that auto acception never be implemented.”

This bright new democrat had figured out REAL fast the sheer horrorifying implications of mass groupedness, and had thought of not only staying the Lindens’ hands this once, with a censorious sense of congress about their action. No, global action had to be contemplated. The prospect of any prim diva being able to put all her shoppers or club-goers into a force-group…any mall-going mangina able to bind every single avatar within her 96 m2 radar range into a group…or what if the Librarians on Info Island decided to group everybody who ever clicked on a kiosk…it made ad-farms seem like a mere stroll on the beach in a drug haze of draw distance at 64…

Contemplating the possibilities of talking with 6,926 people that first night, before 199 fled in knock-kneed horror, willing to ditch the prospect of partying hearty with the Lindens, I put up Propositions 3 and 4:

“Should Linden Lab open-source its server code?” and

“Should tier-paying residents have a collective seat on the board of Linden Lab”?

Well, democracy means a lot of spade-work. It’s the sort of thing of thing that Clay Shirkey, with his Here Comes Everybody sort of mobbing and wise-crowding, isn’t thinking about too much because he figure it will all be Our Gang.

“What does ‘open source’ mean?” asked one Concierge Party-goer, unaware of how his $125 “investment” could be going down the toilet someday. “What is server code?” asked another.

“Yes, paying tier is like paying tax, so yeah, no taxation without representation,” somebody concluded.

“No, it’s not.” “Yes, it is.” “No, it’s not.”

Then…20 minutes of RodneyKing Voom pleading for us to all go along. A group of 6,926 people is always a good place to join hands and sing “We Are the World,” somebody suggested.

Feeling a little bit like Scoble going from Facebook to Plaxo, I was wondering by this time if I could pass any inventory to 6,926 of my new friends. Turns out –nope.

In fact, a group this outrageously huge, well, it just doesn’t load. It took 10 minutes for my props to clear the Submitting….hang. Just trying to see who was on line (I was hoping to get a nice gander into the real log-on statistics with a sample this big!) was impossible, it would only show blanks, or 100 at a time.

One of the interesting statistics you could see in this group were numbers nobody ever thinks much about:

43 Linden Partiers
6,926 Concierge Partiers

And you wonder why they never seem to pass any h’ordeuvres in this joint, let alone get your sim up and running!

In case you thought some or many of these now 6,744 people might use this group to organize, oh, around texture theft or the woefully-inadequate new ad-farm policy or even to turn out votes for Obama, think again.

Tier Nation is busy deciding where they’ll find a toga to wear to the Lindens’ imposed-theme party. I have a feeling the Gor silk stalks are going to be doing a land-office business this week and even the Caliphate-imposing Al-Andalus sim might get their tier payed if they play their cards right.

[update: photo credit for the picture below - Tara5 Oh. The original picture and Tara5's interview with King Philip can be found here: here]

Mrs. Linden’s little boy is growing up. The fair-haired, Donnie-Osmond-cute repository of our hopes and dreams, “El Chefe” who says we can “blame it all on him,” is now honed into a competent media sound-byter and Customer Experience Specialist more caring than the finest call center has to offer. Back at Virtual Worlds 07, Philip blundered on stage with his architecturally-correct shock of hair, saying that gosh, he engineered this platform, and wow, all these people came on it and he didn’t know what to do with them — before rushing off to hobnob with Bill Clinton on Renaissance Island. We weren’t impressed.

By contrast, at SLCC, his haircut was flat, with visible, no-nonsense bangs — and he was oh-so-accessible. While Philip didn’t give an interview to the Herald (they didn’t ask — they’re too kool for skool now), he made lots of time for Reuters and hung in for the entire 3 days of the fanboyz gathering constantly chatting with residents. At his keynoter, he was all charts and graphs and apologies for poor performance and promising to do better, opening his modest corduroy college jacket to flash a t-shirt with the words MISSING IMAGE and saying “That’s me, in the way.”

Oh, to be sure, once the party got started at the exclusive Volunteer’s gathering, Philip came sporting a transparent pearly-white golf shirt, which exposed what Ingrid Ingersoll immediately dubbed “The Phipple”.

Moving the Slider

Still, we’re a long way from SLCC 1, where the fangirlz got together to buy Philip a replica of his avatar’s trademark rocker T with the gaping red mouth, and even sewed on a sequined crotch to some stone-washed jeans to mimic his scripted, blinging boxers. I got a glimpse of the awkward teenage Philip back then, seeing him blush when I said, with his risque outfit on, he needed to move the “package” slider.

Now, Philip is all delivery. He hung out at the workshops and stood around in the hallways after the talks to answer the most obvious questions, “Why is land so expensive?” in his earnest manner, which has now developed away from laconic California hippie or excited Tesla into something like that quintessential television newscaster’s voice with the STRESS on syllables where YOU don’t expect it (Corey Bridges of Multiverse does a wonderful imitation of that…wait…I don’t think it’s an imitation.) “Because we need to give YOU guys the TOOLS to manage the ECONOMY,” he explains.

I caught up with Philip in the corridor after an SLCC panel and asked him why he was logging on so much more now to the world. Should we worry? Shouldn’t he be retiring to a real-life island like Crete?

I could see the gears turning in the Customer Experience Call Center and finally he said, “Well, Prok, I’m visiting all these cool sites that everyone is telling me about like Straylight.” I had sent him a landmark to Straylight. “And not only you,” he said, ever sure to make sure there’s no FIC — except when there needs to be.

NAPKIN TUTORIAL

Lunch was the usual conference-circuit draped chicken, and as we sawed away, with Arbitrage Wise and Lindsay Druart of SL Capital Markets (yet another stock exchange) plying him with financial questions, Philip dead-panned about Ginko. “I talked to those guys,” he said, seeming to imply that he has known of them for a long time and didn’t believe they had intended a Ponzi scheme. He went on to advise, like Zee, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Despite repeated pressing to get involved, either by restoring Lindens to those who lost them, or helping to prosecute Ginko, Philip would only reply: “We are staying away from this.”

“But Benjamin Duranske has you wearing stripes by the end of the year, Philip — you’re the cashier for these alleged scams,” I put in. He grinned, all California white teeth and bronze tan. Philip has an uncanny way of conveying repressed mirth and engagement that probably cover up some actual uneasiness or exasperation.

I said I hope he *did* stay out of the banking and stock market business — whether to GOM or regulate or close — precisely so as not to foreclose any interesting and innovative experiments in making more credit and capital to people around the world with the platform of SL. Of course, not even Grameen Bank is the wonder people imagine, what with the flipping of international development agency loans and venal international civil servants, but still…More white teeth.

Philip hit the softball. He nodded enthusiastically. He loves socialist-capitalist thingies like Grameen Bank — and he didn’t *call* Ginko a Grameen Bank, but merely said he was staying out of it so that the Grameen Banks of the world could emerge.

But…back to sim performance! Soon he was laying linen napkins end to end to explain to Arbitrage, who seemed to be drilling him on why you can’t drive or build well between sims, modeling this complicated, intensive “hand-off” of agents between sims. Of course you can just prop up the build with a rooted prim. Philip was as eager and enthusiastic and just plain *helpful* explaining the age-old sim-crack problem as he was 5 years ago.

KEEP HIM AWAY FROM THE CODE

At the Linden party, at least one staffer went racing across the room to get some face time — saying Philip hadn’t been in the office for 4 months — it’s wall-to-wall conferencing, travel, media interviews. They keep Philip away from the code now (Cory, too) as one Linden explained — I guess it stands to reason, as otherwise SL would suffer even more than it does from “Founding Father Syndrome”.

So just what *is* Philip doing all day? Customer satisfaction surveys. Performance metrics. Cleaning up SL of gambling and ageplay, burnishing his image, in order to sell? He keeps saying no, preferring to re-drop the already-made hint that the server code will be open-sourced within a year, and dodging detailed questions about just what the business model will be by that time.

I hobby-horsed him on the Orientation Island issue, and Draxtor, my favourite German machinima TV guy, flipped open his $2000 laptop that was making a movie right as we spoke (and if he had been Scoble, he could have uploaded it right there to Kyte.tv). ‘Do you mind getting on the news?” Draxtor asked, but didn’t really stop filming.

Philip barely missed a beat, and with a flourish, took out a notebook to write down my suggestion about orientation — impressing Draxtor. He wants you to feel *heard*. I think the program for the Reg Apis needs to be opened up to others to assess their metrics, too, and even non-reg API orientation such as the resident-created infohubs need to be measured. “OK, tell you what,” says Philip, all business. “I’ll put everyone who wants in the list, but if their retention rates aren’t at a certain level, they will be cut out.”

SOCIAL DARWINISM

“Social Darwinism!” I cried. “It would be better to just sell the slots on the list,” I said.

“It’s the same thing — people who can compete are the same ones who can afford to pay,” Philip said matter-of-factly, always dismissive of open markets and trading them for technocratic meritocracy. “But newcomers can buy in if they raise the money,” I countered. It’s hopeless.

“Philip looks like a school-boy called to task when you asked him the question after the keynote,” Draxtor commented later. I had asked him what SL’s influence was on First Life now — and in years to come — as that is how ultimately it would be judged. No, it wasn’t a trick question, as Chosen Few thought it was — it was genuine. Would it erode cultural differences? This often happens with mass-market American-made entertainment media overseas. Would it drown out distinction? Or even when hundreds of thousands of Russians and Chinese can in theory log on to Virtual Japan?

As for today’s influence, he replied sanguinely with a mantra that is long-practiced in media interviews and around the office: “We have a thousand people who make more than a $1,000 a month.” Um, is that after tier? As for tomorrow’s…”I think 10 years down the line is when we start to see Second Life taking away time and energy from the real world,” he envisions — with a grand shrinking of the communication sphere. And a seeemingly preposterous notion that virtual worlds will be “bigger than the web.”

Back on earth, the performance charts and graphs told a pretty frank story of a service not always available, with poor FPS for a good chunk of the time and for many people and lost inventory — which he declared as “less” by measuring only one kind of lost inventory problem (no rez from inventory) — a premature declaration indeed as the bug was back this weekend.

WOULD PHILIP BETRAY CHINESE DISSIDENTS?

Many might associate Philip with the ultimate in freedom of expression and creativity, right? That’s because you haven’t figured out that engineering the software is far more important to him than this or that freedom of expression case. Listen to his recent BBC interview. He makes a tremendous mumble about China. The Beeb reporter asks him very directly whether he’d turn over the information about a Chinese dissident to the Chinese government, the way Yahoo did.

Instead of just saying “yes” or “no,” he embarks on a side trip, saying that Yahoo has to play to the lowest common denominator, but SL will be on each country’s servers, and LL will “enable the platform” so that every government can “have the tools they need” for implementing their local laws. Um…is this essentially making China’s work easier for it?

He speaks vaguely about a common set of values that will get evolved as we are all standing “here” — a here that at one point in his interview is “on servers in the U.S. where we have to abide by U.S. law” but at other points seemed more like what Jerry Paffendorf has called “the other here” which is this common sensibility in SL, which presumably overrides pesky things like Chinese censorship (by ways that aren’t clear yet).

Contradicting his point about Yahoo and common denominators, Philip explains ardently that if, for the good of the platform, to make it available to the most people, they had to make some restrictions due to laws (like those against gambling in the U.S.), then, that sacrifice would indeed be made. Would their be some Chinese dissident eggs broken in making this omelette? The reporter pressed: will you in fact turn over the dissident names?

Philip begins to mumble again — but professionally and smoothly mumble, like “We as a company pride ourselves on maintaining privacy” blah blah blah. He concedes that they would have to look at each case.

We’re left thinking that if LL ever has an office in Asia, and the Chinese government asks them to shut down a parcel or give a name, “for the good of the platform,” they just might do it — all their high-minded talk about not playing to the lowest common denominator like Yahoo, notwithstanding.

This is what it takes — Philip enduring endless fanboyz questioning, falling on his sword and displaying poor performance charts and vowing to do better, making some patter up that sort of kinda sounds like it isn’t like Yahoo about China. This is what it takes so that “everybody in the world will use Second Life — something he appears genuinely to believe in.

By Prokofy Neva, Art Dept.

Art — and the figures in and around it — can be inscrutable. In the much-commented thread about the raid in Blister, Dutch amateur artist Lisae Boucher finally provides a link to another SL store where her controversial works are on sale — images that she says Michael Linden has cleared for “keeping SL safe together”. The parcel in Blister is now renamed, and put on “buy pass” for $20, and the art that was the subject of abuse reports, visits, and more than 100 comments at the Herald, has been removed — apparently out of respect for the neighbours’ sensibilities.

In a thread already filled with her threats to report this site to the Internet service provider and claims that her privacy is invaded, Lisae offers to send me the link to her other store inworld, but challenges me not to publish it, claiming that if it *is* published, that could lead to more harassment in world, more abuse reports, even more Lindens. Receiving a poisoned chalice like that isn’t easy, but after she sent the landmark, I visited the store in question I had no doubt that the link could be provided to the public. Why?

Because it’s a store in a giant mall, checked off as a “mature” parcel in a mature region, and a store not only with 22,558 traffic today, before it was written about by the Herald, and when it is not obviously linked to the other site that became the target of vigilantes, but it even has dance poles paying out $2 to build the traffic. The landmark Lisae provided to me teleported me directly into a camper’s pole, and while the store was deserted, she reports that word had evidently gotten out and sales were brisk. When a store is *already* at 22,558 with camp chairs and porn art all over it for sale, you can’t blame a Herald link for visitors.

Perusing the vendor, I pondered whether the images could be construed as child porn. The images are very realistic, but not RL humans. I’m not an expert on this subject — but then, few of us are. And I can only provide my own opinion: the pictures of a tall, black man in an erotic pose next to a short, white, pre-pubescent girl in a shy pose can very likely be construed as falling under the newly-interpreted Community Standards against “broadly offensive material”. Look, this isn’t Gumby and Pokey here.

I think few people looking through the portfolio would disagree. Why? Because Lisae’s stories about difficulties placing penises just right, or calculations of the angle of erection, fall apart when you see the pictures, which show the figure of the man — described as a pearl fisher — in various poses and states. Why does the observer conclude that he is tumescent? Because he’s shown as flaccid in other pictures. The contrast is very clear.

The girl isn’t anything at all like any 18-year-old or even 16-year-old; she’s more like 12. In one scene, strangely, she is lying naked in a tent flashing the finger at the viewer with an angry look on her face. She’s running in another, and in a third, looking angry and seeming to throw a tantrum, shaking her fists.

On Lisae’s website, she has added a back-story of sorts dated July 19, after my first story appeared, explaining that the girl — Pearl, Princess of the Amazon — was kidnapped along with her mother, who was forced to jump off a cliff to her doom for fear of capture, and yet somehow Pearl was saved by the pearl fisherman…The pearl fisher is described as variously “her step-father” and “her father”.

Lisae runs an amateur website which she advertises on her profile, with pictures that seems to have a membership system. I couldn’t help thinking that operating in SL, she felt much of the same set of circumstances applied — that only certain friends or people on various networks, who registered, who seemed to be “like-minded” would be sharing these pictures on the Internet, and by the same token, in SL, it might work the same way.

But SL is and isn’t the Internet. The Internet is so big that your own little amateur site with pictures that you get loose networks of friends and friends of friends to see can actually be a very small pond, be totally lost, and not get much traffic. And SL is so much like a small town — yet a big place, too — that when you put out a store with adult art of this nature, instead of just a close circle of friends, you may well cause a stir and get a stampede of visitors.

You can’t claim on a parcel that has 20,000 traffic and camping poles and art for sale, checked off to be in SEARCH and found with strings of terms (in this case “Club, Art, Shop, sex rooms, nude naked women, free items & money, nice, gadgets, rental shops. 18+ only! Playboy missing…”), with art for sale in vendors, that this is a Tupperware party and that anyone who writes about it and places a link is guilty of “causing harassment” and shouldn’t publish the link.

So, am I suggesting this art should be abuse-reported? No, nothing of the kind. I’d actually encourage people not to do so, in fact. Because as I’ve repeatedly stated, I don’t think any of us should be playing this wierd game with the Lindens, where they pretend there are community standards that a “community” has supposedly defined, and we pretend that we are defining them by abuse-reporting images that appear to qualify both under the LL TOS/CS as “Real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depiction of sexual or lewd acts involving or appearing to involve children or minors.” No, not until we get better clarification of just how to understand this with concrete examples — examples we are not ever likely to get due to the desire of LL to avoid appearing to control content and specify boundaries that it can’t keep.

Michael Linden has supposedly “cleared” on this art, yet I find it strange that he has, and inscrutable. Did he really see this particular vendor, or only those that remained after the images that drew the abuse reports were removed? I certainly don’t wish to copy the image here in full — and I don’t even wish to use those black boxes sometimes appearing in the tabloid press because to do so would still present a very disturbing picture of an adult and child in a questionable pose.

Why? Well, it seems like it might well qualify under an ISP’s TOS about obscenity, but more likely, it would inspire even the maker of the images to engage in a curious form of gotcha and report the site as obscene. It’s like the old SSG trick in TSO — they’d trash somebody’s home and make an obscene picture and spell out banned words in floor tiles, then…abuse report it as in violation of the TOS — and get it to stick.

I have faith in the readers of the Herald, however, that by and large, most have no desire to sic any volunteers, neighbours, or Lindens on someone merely because they make art that seems by probably anybody’s admission, at least borderline “non-socially redeeming”. Judging from the sales reported, however, there are plenty of customers for whatever is redeeming or not. Efforts to show that this or that Internet site or this or that store in SL may have far more graphic and questionable stuff are beside the point; it’s *this* set of paintings that we are told are “cleared by the Lindens” and that’s why it’s of interest so that we can start to understand the parameters of what is allowable even under what seems a draconian policy.

All kinds of scenarios are possible, of course. Lisae may not be a real Dutch woman of 18, as stated on her profile, but a sting operation by some vice squad of RL police (not likely, given her meandering justifications of nudism and such in comments). Or she could be Dutch, but a 300-pound 47-year-old truck driver logging on from a truck stop.

But in Second Life, as I have said, everybody knows you’re a dog. If you say you are a young person just starting out learning poser and having difficulty learning to put clothes on the figures, or find it technically challenging to get dicks at the right angle, that’s all plausible, and in the virtuality of SL, we have to take you at your word, at face value. It might very well be that this rather short young figure is really “18 or 19″ as the back story says. And the pink chibi may well have cleared it, and struck a blow for freedom of expression in spite of what appears to be a blanket suppression of it.

I just can’t be sure.

So I’ll let the reader decide. Mona Lisae…or Phony Lisae?

Prokofy Neva, Music Critic/Griefer Watch/Hey, when are we going to get a real music critic?

Now with open and moderated comments! –Uri and Prok

An ardent fan of Second Life’s popular singer Kim Seifert, IM’d me, hopping mad at the Lily Pad Lounge in Clyde. Or rather…several sims away, as the sim had crashed due to griefers wrecking a concert of this SL live performer, who describes herself as performing “a little soul, blues, and jazz thrown in for a full color spectrum.”

Once again — apparently this is getting to be a regular occurance for a number of SL live acts — a griefer came rolling on to the sim, released the usual Cosby Jello-wned textures all over the place, put out some screaming grief balls that self-replicated and then whoops, rocked the sim right offline for a good long while, because nobody could find any Lindens.

How could this happen, with all the tools given to residents to combat the increasing epidemic of disruptors like this, bent on denying everybody a second life? In this case, the problem was in part due to the venue owners not owning the entire sim — it’s a mainland sim — and therefore being unable to keep griefers completely at bay. The sim-crasher — as many do now — also seemed to have a curious shield, or to be using a hacked version of the open-sourced client, that prevented the owners from being able to eject him immediately. An island venue might be able to insist on a group or instantly globally ban a griefer from the sim. But many venues are on the mainland, where clubland is cheaper, and even island ampitheaters can be on rented parts of sim, not the entire sim.

The griefer used a throwaway day-old alt with the stunningly original name of “Reynoldsballz Burt”. In a new twist from the usual repertoire of the Patriotic Nigras, which includes the Jello-owned stuff, this bedroom-eyed bozo appeared to be making an attempt at blackmail, typing into chat before the sim crashed that the concert-organizers had to pay $10,000 to a well-known landowner each week, or face griefing. The landowner’s name was mispelled, and it was unlikely he had anything to do with the clumsy bid at extortion.

Not to be intimidated, Kim Seifert stopped her song and said, “Mr. Burt…you have just commited a crime…it is called extortion…better start hiding” — and then the sim went down.

Mr. Burt is indeed now hiding — the Lindens removed him from the People List. He’ll likely be back on another alt, and wreck another song before too long. It’s frustrating experiences like this that are increasingly making the Live Music community — like merchants in stores and couples in rentals; like partcipants in large panel discussion; like reporters at press conferences and entrepreneurs at business meetings — as mad as hell that the Lindens just aren’t doing enough to stop the antics of a few that are ruining the experiences of the many.

I caught up with Gavin MacKay, Kim Seifert’s manager, who took me on a tour of the Lily Pad, SL’s oldest live music venue, where Frogg Marlowe and Jaycatt Nino used to play. Frogg and Jaycatt still hold their Froggy Fridays at the Amphibian Lounge up in the sky in Lingell now.

With the economic slump in general and the summer slump specifically, I’ve noticed anecdotally, popping around to a few live music venues that I used to be unable even to get near, that attendance is way down there, too — filling a sim with 40 or 80 on an island was the norm; now I see 20 or 30. So it’s indeed aggravating to be discouraging by griefing, too, what many find the best part of Second Life: live music.

Gavin believes that the extortion threat was merely a distraction, not to be taken seriously, and that the griefer may not even have been related to the notorious griefing groups like the PNs. He might have been merely a wierd obsessive, for example — unfortunately, the more popular singers get, the more likely they are to acquire these nuts seeking attention by linking themselves to a prominent person.

Although only born that day, the “newbie” Burt was already a member of Kim’s 500-plus fangroup — something that just wasn’t likely — and didn’t even fit the usual organized griefer’s M.O. Perhaps the throw-away alt was paid to make the attack — but who knows? That’s why they’re anonymous — you can’t know.

Gavin says he has a couple of suspects now under investigation, but his real challenge is to the Lindens: stop this ability to make anonymous, unaccountable accounts, which he and Kim Seifert’s fans and many others believe are the chief factor in griefing in SL.

Gavin said he routinely gave a ban list to the venue owners, and they were controling the door, but because they don’t control the entire sim, even when “Burt” was ejected, he was able to use his sim-crashing gear from the next door neighbour’s parcel.

When asked if he abuse-reported the incident at the time, Gavin replied, ” LL wants you sit on your ass and fill out paperwork while your sim is being brought down by a bunch of jugheads.”

“This guy purposely brought down a sim that someone is paying LL to own, and their response was to suspend the av who did for 7 days,” he said. Burt seemed to be gone from the People list permanently, but it bears checking next week.

“Only LL can stop the sim-crashers,” he commented. “We avs can’t do that. They control what goes on in the world, and can make the sim-crashing tools inactive. We can’t do that.”

I have to wonder why the Lindens never deprecate things like the “Doomsday Script” or “Bang Bang Bang” used by griefers — but they never met a script they didn’t like. To deprecate a script like that might…prevent the working of SL’s 17-and-a-half elevators, or might put a crimp in the script-kiddies’ creativity. Can’t have that!

In desperation, Gavin finally said, “The real story here is that LL supports griefers, to the detriment of the people who want to live in this world, and pay them to do so.” Asked what LL is specifically doing to support griefers, Gavin said, “Because they allow the existence of the griefers and their tools, and the opening up of the free accounts is the biggest tool the griefers have. It makes them completely untouchable.”

“A free account is nothing more than a kamikaze bomb,” he added.

Gavin conceded that even concert-goers might have “No Payment Info On File” if they were Europeans, Latin Americans or even North Americans who couldn’t get Pay-Pal or credit cards to work (an increasing problem in SL), or didn’t have them. But he pointed out that griefers tend to have one thing in common: NPIOF.

“You know, we can almost deal with the bastards given the tools we have, IF they didn’t have the ability to crash a SIM… and the whole concept of LL allowing this continue is freakin’ ridiculous,” he said indignantly.

“If your neighbor came every day and kicked dents in your car, wouldn’t the police put a stop to it?”

Gavin, like many other event organizers, believes the Lindens could do more to negate the ability of people to crash sims. LL has done a lot in the last year to negate the ability to crash the entire grid, by limiting the self-replicating balls through the use of fire-lines. Now they need to take it down to the level of a sim.

Gavin noted that another avatar by the name Coon Yifu, a typical PN sort of racist and anti-furry name, was also in the area when the balls went flying and was still in the list — probably “innocent until proven guilty (you gotta wonder why the Lindens put in names like “Yifu” — it’s asking for trouble). Apparently in the chaos, people forgot to abuse-report him, and there he sits.

***

Note: as this is yet another Herald story reporting the news of Second Life about the criminal antics of griefers associated with, or copy-catting, the PNs, it’s likely to be targeted by that same group and its copy-cats here in the comments and spammed, and many are able to get through their spam and hateful remarks even if moderated. It’s also another story in which people obsessed with backlashing against me line up to take their hits. So I’m closing the comments. I’m truly tired of being overrun by griefers, spammers, haters, and really vicious obsessives. I don’t *fear* publishing them or their criticisms; in fact, unlike others, I’ve been letting their comments through. But in doing so, I feel entitled to fight back — then a number of people begin to complain that the comments are turning into flame-ridden blood-thirsty battlefields.

So you’re free to discuss this column — but it will have to be back on my blog under my rules at this link. There, you will not be able to use an anonymous name; you’ll have to post with your Second Life name, or a RL name or well-known bloggers’ name to take accountability for any nasty attacks you chose to make. If you don’t, you’ll be IP-banned again and again, as long as it takes. Nasty and critical remarks are tolerated; they must be tied to a name that can stand up and identity at least an SL avatar with them. My other rule for my blog is that if you incite or cause me RL or SL damages, i.e. stalk me at home in RL or crash my sim in SL or engage in RL disclosure or incitement of stalkers, you are not welcome, full stop.

By Prokofy Neva, Community Affairs

Tipped off by some newbie helpers who staff a monitoring network with Linden support, Linden staff may have seized or “force-copied” anime paintings said to contain what was deemed illegal child anime pornography from a cabana tonight in the working-class water sim of Blister — leaving only adult nude amateur art mostly made with a 3D modeling program: Poser.

The tipsters – who asked not to be named – said an adult lesbian couple had made the paintings themselves using images of pre-teen Millenium anime characters from a 3-D modeling website.

A visit to the site of the raid showed the cheap cabanas to be owned by Lisae Boucher and Femke Bikcin, who did not respond to Herald queries. Sources say neither resident was removed from SL. The two appear to make a modest SL living by selling their paintings for L$25. Conflicting reports suggest that either the content owners – Ms. Boucher and Bikcin – suddenly removed the worst of the images upon being warned by LL-sponsored Volunteers, or their pictures were “force-copied” by Michael Linden and determined to be in violation of a stricter new TOS/CS interpretation released in May by Daniel Linden, prohibiting the display of child pornography or real or virtual depictions of “ageplay”: “[C]ertain types of content and activity are simply not acceptable in any form,” including “Real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depiction of sexual or lewd acts involving or appearing to involve children or minors”.

The artwork still remaining on site included disturbing depictions of nudes and skeletons and a cut-out of a decidedly underage fairy. Some mentors were of the opinion the Lindens had not finished the job, and should have banned the residents instantly and removed them from the People list as they do with grid-crashers.

Broadly offensive?

The monitoring for offenses such as “ageplay” is being done inside the officially-supported Volunteers communication channel, where mentors, volunteers, and other helpers are now keeping surveillance over the behaviour of their fellow residents and stay in constant touch with Lindens in the channel about what action to take.

The group, recently revised and renamed under the direction of Blue Linden, appears to have taken on enhanced capacities in keeping with the new challenge of “Keeping Second Life Safe, Together” and policing “broadly offensive” material.

In a separate development, sources in the channel contacted the Herald last week with concerns about how such possibly unlawful content as child avatar depictions should be determined, and what standards should be used in particular for distinguishing RL pornography showing pictures of human beings, versus fantasy art such as anime portraits, or screenshots made of child avatars in Second Life, or created in modeling programs such as Poser. Mentors have been very divided on the topic, like much of the rest of SL society, but the Lindens have sent a strong signal: abuse-report anything you find objectionable if you have concerns that it could be unlawful. However, the legality of such depictions can vary by RL country, further complicating matters.

Clearly, the Lindens do not appear adverse to using this newly revised Volunteers system not merely to help newbies on Orientation Island, as was their old brief, but to deploy helpers across the grid to be the eyes and ears of LL in ferreting out broadly-offensive material such as child pornography that nobody would routinely find in one of the numerous $5000/512 m2 cheap water sims up north in the continent of Nautilus.

Some venerable oldbies like Suzie Boffin, who used to appear frequently on the number one slot of the old leader board for positions of wealth, land, and positive ratings in SL, appear to be concerned about the use of this channel for this particular surveillance purpose. And Mia Linden makes it clear that she does not wish volunteers to use the group to discuss definitions of ageplay and child pornography. Yet Lexie Linden does encourage volunteers to abuse report what they find, and clearly the volunteers feel empowered to identify and discuss the actions of fellow residents they believe to be miscreants.

According to the official Linden police blotter, the Lindens have been cracking down more on objectionable porn and behaviour now clearly prohibited by the TOS and Community Standards. On July 12 in Blair, for example, LL handed down a 3-day suspension for “broadly visible mature content”. A warning was issued for “broadly offensive” content in Endicott on July 13. Citing the offense as “Community Standards: Broadly Offensive Content or Conduct,” a 1-day suspension was handed down in Empyrean for “Disturbing the peace with offensive content”. A teen was caught trying to access the main grid as well on July 12 and suspended for 14 days.

The raid in Blister didn’t find its way into the police blotter for Saturday, June 14, now on display; that’s often the case, as the Lindens strategically include only a fraction of incidents on the blotter. Instead, “Mature content in PG region” was chosen to illustrate the problem, with a warning issued.

Broadly attractive: LL now has more than 8 million sign-ups.

CHATLOG FROM VOLUNTEERS (FORMERLY MENTORS) GROUP CHAT

Alida Tomsen: oh that is very wrong
Hionimi Engawa: I even found a pregnant child av, very disturbing
Hionimi Engawa: AR myself to death here, someone told me he got offendedby an ageplay parcel/sim, and yes, Nemo it’s called 241, 9, 49, all kinds of child and sexuality here, already filed like 6 abuses.
Frodo Hartunian: OMG
Pyrii Akula: It’s a private sim isn’t it? How did he get there?
starhunter Gall : nemo is main land sim
Arrianna Asturias: uh oh, what did I miss?
Hionimi Engawa: Someone told me of it
Gabriella Molinari: gesus
Frodo Hartunian: gah
Susie Boffin: Why are you telling us in Mentor Chat? I really don’t care.
Glitch Braess: THere are avatars in second life that choose to be their normal RL height… which isn’t 7 feet. please keep that in mind.
Hionimi Engawa : She was looking for normal xhild stuff, roleplayer, but not sexual, and shockingly found the place
Danielle Ferguson: This is quite true as am rather short as well
starhunter Gall: agreed Glitch, just a AV is short dont make them a child
Susie Boffin: I am 5’3″ in SL which is my real height
Hionimi Engawa: Yes yes, I’m checking their profiles, they really do perform child porn! D:<
ASCIIrider Hailey: ok it’s a GAME folks. .have ary real minors had sex because of this?
Second Life: Frodo Hartunian has left this session.
Hionimi Engawa: For the fourth time, I’m reading their profiles, they play child, having sex, damn it
Arrianna Asturias: It’s against the TOS
Danielle Ferguson: Thank you ASCII
Susie Boffin : Big deal. Ignore them if you don’t like it
Hionimi Engawa: LL bans ageplay, so that’s why I’m telling, if you don;t care, stop moaning and just close the chat
Trinity Coulter: I will say this… its not necessarily real children, but its also disappointing to have Official SL Volunteers be so dismissive of the rules
Stormy Wilde: Hionimi file an abuse report, lindens cant do anything without it.
010000100111001001100001011011 Omlet: agreed
ASCIIrider Hailey : they PLAY children.. not ARE children
Izira Kirkorian: exactly
Arrianna Asturias: I mean, it’s up to you, but if it bothers you, report it.
Arrianna Asturias: Age play is against TOS. Bottom line.
Arrianna Asturias: Yes, exactly
Elhaym Keynes: are there pictures of RL children in sexually explicit situations?
Hionimi Engawa: I am, 6 files reported
Drakon Lameth : Arrianna, it’s not technically against the ToS, they haven’t ammended it yet…
Joelle Tardis: The issue here is I believe that is considered a TOS violation as some Places Have laws against it online as well as in RL
Willy White: S is a real big place
ASCIIrider Hailey: show me where in the TOS that is, which a court ruled not valid anyhow
Second Life: Izira Kirkorian has left this session.
Arrianna Asturias: LL acturally asked us to report it.
Arrianna Asturias: I thought they had. Sorry about that. But they did recommend that we report it if we saw it.
Rhaorth Antonelli: ageplay is nto against the TOS ageplaying a monor in lewd acts etc is against the TOS
Jana Fleming: one day a governmental agency will decide that sl needs to be shut down because of it, then we’ll all care :p
Drakon Lameth : when do we start reporting the churches of assorted religions next? I hear its against the law in numerious countries to have a religious artifact of another religion.
Yumi Murakami : Elhaym, avatar depictions are enough as per Blog
ASCIIrider Hailey: great and a blog isn’t a TOS or community standards
Elhaym Keynes : but the avatar’s may not be related to the sim itself is why I ask, right?
Yumi Murakami: it’s grossly offensive content
Arrianna Asturias: There is a big difference between religious freedom, even sexual freedom and a depiction of sex with a child.
ASCIIrider Hailey: simple ya don’t like it. .LEAVE! no one is forcing you to stay and watch
Joelle Tardis: as a parent I agree
ASCIIrider Hailey: if it were REAL minors I’d care
Arrianna Asturias: So, SL should be a haven for pedophiles to come and gets the kicks, huh?
Hionimi Engawa: ASCIIrider, I’m not liking it in a way I find it offensive, and someone came to me reporting this, and I’m helping him
Rox Arten: I would have to agree as well it is abuse and feeding the appatites of pervs only puts our children in rl in danger
Drakon Lameth : Arrianna, we’re having to report Age Play because some fedral governments don’t like it… I’m waiting for the next reports, for violence (when we raid the Gorean sims), for Beastiality (when we raid the furry sims), and for various religions reasons.
Trinity Coulter: “‘If you say you’re under 18′ applies to the real life person. Child avatars are not a problem in themselves. You can say your avatar is under 18, just as long as your under-18 avatar is not engaged in lewd behavior.” — Robin Linden
ASCIIrider Hailey: and hey I’m offended by Gor.. my solution I don’t go there
Drakon Lameth: Rox, Arrianna… would you rather they were doing it here in SL, or actually doing it in RL?
Lexie Linden: Hi Mentors! Please do report things you see as being abuse and if you want to discuss or debate the topic among yourselves, please meet somewhere to do that : )
Rox Arten: real minors or not… the adults pretending to have sex with the “children” are sick
ASCIIrider Hailey: and who cares what othewr goverments say? last I knew the servers were in the USA
Rox Arten: would you care to discuss the implications of what they are pretending
Arrianna Asturias: And yes, child porn, real or cartoon is illegal in the US
Arrianna Asturias: They shouldn’t be doing it at all
Drakon Lameth leaves the chat humming: “When they came for the…”
Arrianna Asturias: So, a depiction of an adult having sex with a minor shouldn’t be legal here either.
Rox Arten: Drakon I am a survivor of child sexual abuse
ASCIIrider Hailey: ok people get a damned grip! this is ADULTS doing roleplay!
Kris Spade: Could you all please take Lexie’s advice? This debate can go on forever.
Mia Linden: PLEASE DISCUSS THIS IS ANOTHER CHANNEL. not in the mentor channel as Lexie just asked u all.
Arrianna Asturias: Sorry, I signed on in the middle.
Hionimi Engawa: I agree, everyone is actually only busy defending their opinion in here :\

UPDATE: An additional source reports indicate a reason for the conflicting reports. Apparently some of the worst of the alleged porn was kept underwater and out of sight. And Michael Linden’s avatar is described by eyewitnesses as a small, “violently pink chibi squid,” in wierd “Flying Spaghetti Monster” mode. He could have been mistaken for an underwater creature in the sea of Blister.

FURTHER UPDATE 3:30 PM 7/14: I’m changing the headline to REVIEW instead of SEIZE because it appears from witness reports, some of whom were the mentors who abuse-reported the content, that Michael Linden reviewed and “force-copied” (i.e. used God-mode to copy an item with no-copy permission set) the material, but then the owners, depending on the account, either swooped down quickly to remove it to avoid further action, or conversed with their more reasonable neighbours who persuaded them to remove some of the content. More on this story is coming soon based on further interviews and group posts — stay tuned!

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Virtual Estate

The other night I attended an off-the-record meeting of inworld business people who, for some reason I couldn’t fathom decided to use the new outworld Crowne Plaza meeting space (claiming to be the first such private meeting facility in SL!) under the theory that this was “safer” or “more elegant”. What it really was, was a box, with some kind of security system that kept knocking away even everybody who had joined the group. You couldn’t have picked a more apt metaphor for the sad tale unfolding in Second Life: outworld businesses, mainly metaversal developers, are able to make a whopping $33,000 a year per employee average revenue, mainly through servicing companies like Crowne seeking a presence in SL; even $9000 median income. Inworld land businesses, if they can show a profit on the Positive Monthly Linden Flow chart maintained by Meta Linden, are more likely to be making at best about $3000 a year *after tier* (far more research and better math is needed on both categories of businesses).

The Crowne furniture and setting was uninspired, unlike some of the really spectacular rental sims out there these days, like this new mountain waterfall development. I’m a big fan of Lilith trees, but seeing the flat palms one too many times arranged in exactly the same way begins to wear on you. Still, sitting in a box with Trumanville surroundings — what better way to contemplate the fool’s errand called “mainland rentals” which to one extent or another, form the bedrock of most SL businesses?

Many people have a misplaced notion of “land barons” based on the myths perpetrated by the media (including the inky tabloid you’re clutching in your hand) as fat, blinged-out money-grubbing, greedy capitalists bent on rapacious destruction of innocent newbies in threadbare rags. The fact is, all of us in SL are owners or accessors of high-end graphic cards and DSL lines here, people. If we’re going to weep, it should be for a couple of hard working gals who charge only $280/200 prims a week, who, when you do the math, make only…$50 US a month which they usually have to blow on houses, or buying out ad farms or grief parcels on the riotous lands outside their manicured Damani prefabbed sims.

Have you done the math?

A casino and mall landlord only makes enough to keep himself in flip-flop bling, not the butter-soft pimped baby furry skin boots favoured by tabloid editors.

THE SAD MATH OF MAINLAND

Let’s say you spent US $2200 on the auction for your flat, grassland nothing-special new class-5 sim with a hard-to-pronounce name like Mkhachkala (I swear the Lindens did just name a whole continental area after every Russian province *but* that one). You decide to go “fancy” and divide up to only 16 parcels, leaving one for a commons area with some casinos, freebie dumpster-diving or other money-soakers in the middle, which means 15 x 4096 m2 for which you can *try* to charge $25 US each a month ($6756/mo or 1689 Lindens/wk).

But…you’d be wiser not to try to get that as everybody else has the exact same idea as you, you discover as you stare out over the steppes of Krasnoyarsk and Ulyanovsk. So you go with $1500 and try to offer some extras, maybe some free furniture or a TV (that runs $999 at least). Let’s say by a miracle of charming personality and SLevents with sploder balls you get 100 percent occupancy and $333 in rental revenue (never the case). $195 immediately goes out the door in tier for the sim — oops now you have only $138 left per month, and that means it will take you 16 months — a year and four months, to make back your $2200 “investment”. But…let’s say your occupancy this month is 60…or 40…you are facing the grim prospect of having to bail.

The game of Second Life basically consists of about 50,000 people or so trying to beat the odds of those grim numbers each months by all kinds of ingenious methods. So let’s say they buy a sim, but they sell off part of it to a friend 4 x 4096 x $60,000 — they can then get about US $880 recouped on the purchase price and make the wait less painful, if they can be sure that friend will keep those parcels nice, possibly with a store those newbies in the rentals need. Or perhaps they’ll group their land and get about 6,500 m2 of tier generated from the 10 percent group bonus, and use that tier to flip land for sale around the area, or perhaps buy a few lots on the margins to protect the view and reduce their risk — because at any moment, on all four sides of their flat kingdom of money-making dreams, chaos can break out in the form of a ridiculously laggy texture store, newbies barn, sex palace, or just plain stupid giant chicken. Lag on another sim infects yours due to the “child agents”; clubs and malls are not only blighty, they add to traffic and that means griefing. The landbaron — that caricature of a man who is usually a woman in SL — in fact means sitting on their front porch with a shotgun trying to keep themselves awake to take care of tenants 24/7 so their rentals are filled, keep griefers at bay, and stay one step of the landbots if they’re trying to run their land-flipping tier on the side as well.

ISLAND MATH

Do the math on the islands to understand why no one in their right mind goes into mainland rentals: there, if you terraform your island nicely, you can sell each of the 15 4096s for even only L$25,000 (you won’t get more given the competition)– and still make US $1387 in the first month, making back almost all or all of your purchase price of US $1695. And now you can still charge US $25 and make US $375 a month in rentals — or if you have really nice landscaping and build your own pretty prefabs, even $30 or more per 4096 — and still have US $80 in the clear after tier of $295 is all paid. Not much of an income, eh but get a couple islands going, maybe a commercial strip and a club area where you can pump out more revenue, and as long as you can keep full occupancy, assure yourself of say, US $2400 a month income for 30 islands.

A SUMMER SLUMP, MMORPEG STAGNATION OR AN MLM?

Of course, occupancy and sales were what everybody was groaning about at this Crowne meeting and several others I’ve attended or hosted in recent weeks at the Sutherland Dam — but people had a hard time figuring out how they could cooperate when everybody competes — sure, when they get to 90 percent occupancy they start referring to colleagues, but now, everybody’s scrambling. At all of these type of meetings lately, there’s talk about a “summer slump” and trying to reassure themselves it’s nothing — but they’ve been talking about it since St. Patrick’s Day and here it is really summer and the slump is the worst it has ever been in SL for many people. Occupancy is at 0 or 30 percent for many. People are eating a US $75 tier level, a $780 tier level — it feels like the over-expensive inventory and maintenance you pay in an MLM. Even Ancient Shriner of Coldwell Banker, with all kinds of RL business backing and blighty ads peppering the mainland landscape claims only 30-40 percent occupancy, and high turnover (something he seems proud of, strangely, but given their scheme of holding deposits which they can invest for interest, it may make sense).

More people are online, but fewer people are buying or renting. Many business people are noticing that the problems with billing that numerous Second Lifers are experiencing and the problems in purchasing Lindens from inworld are taking a terrible toll on their sales. A customer poised to pay a month’s rental, or buy a big, expensive vehicle suddenly jams and can’t access the $5000 or $10,000 he needs to get started, despite having a valid credit or debit card onfile. Frustrated, but addicted to SL, he gives up and goes back to that free living arrangement with a friend and stays. Some people wonder if *their* economy is tanking, but maybe other people’s aren’t (SL always makes people jealous that way). If you are a new German player flush with stronger currency making interesting prefabs and building a lovely-looking rentals sim where you can talk to your customers auf Deutsch, you’re simply going to do better than somebody from Bayonne, even if they’ve learned to put “grundstucke” and “miete” in their classified keywords.

WHY MAKE TIER?

Many landlords are not making tier and trying to talk themselves out of ever making it. Indeed, curiously, the more I talk to them the more I marvel at how many women especially are willing to go into this business and not make tier. And that’s because their mindset is completely different from that of someone who simply must obtain a bottom line or get out. They’re proud of themselves if they just manage to pay for their game. They come to SL primarily to socialize at first, and maybe try their hand at making clothing or furniture. Yet it’s so competitive, and so hard to meet the right people, that they turn to rentals as both a side income and a way to socialize. The typical rental emporium often contains not only housing, but a club and stores with vendors and some kind of theme that helps generate content and experience, whether it be South Pacific or Country Western or Hotlanta, and keep people interacting, talking — and buying, which is what they’ll do when they reach a comfort level, socializing. The hours logged on most are by people who own or rent land and create or socialize on land; the people willing to not make tier back are holding up the Lindens’ entire empire.

LAND GLUT END TO LANDLORD DREAMS

These mainly high-school educated people, who perhaps went to community college and even work in real-life hotel management or sales in large chains like Wal-marts, buy into SL almost like into Amway, paying a little more to resell something that most people know they could get for less, hoping they make a little income and the people paying a little more get a little better social and customer service experience. But they wind up frustrated and angry at the Lindens land-glutting, popular stereotypes of landbarons, and deadbeat tenants, many of whom bail out of SL merely becaue they can’t get their game working.

The gravest problem for the nation of landlords now is that cheaper land — prime waterfront is down as low as $10.9/11.9/meter — means people go off and buy their own land. And as much as they may gloat that they are the winners of Second Life by helping to make losers of other people, those other people — by liquidating, abandoning, cashing out, drive down the value of the Linden, deplete the business core willing to keep engaging in this utter folly of investing unpaid labour for risk-laded virtual sales. They make the MLM — sustained largely on belief — collapse.

To be sure, those gloaters are merely the next generation of frustrated land-sellers as long-time observers can confirm, as their pristine new mainland beachfront becomes uglified with clubs and malls by other eager new landlord-nation members without much aesthetic sense (some of whom were driven out of nice residential rentals into the more lucrative mall business because land prices plummetted *cough*).

So the newly-blighted then sell out to liquidators at $8 or $9/m or less and go back to island renting in the never-ending SL drama cycle that depletes the pockets of mainland landlords, delights and then frustrates and impoverishes short-term end-use landowners, fills up the coffers of especially themed island owners and finally makes a quick buck for small-time landbarons. But don’t be too quick to scorn people with names like Buzz and companies with names like SLeaze-By-Night Liquidators and profiles that say THIS LAND IS OUR LAND, YOUR LAND IS MY LAND. You will thank your lucky stars they are there to pay as much as $8 or $9 per meter on your now-uglified formerly $18/m prime waterfront. And don’t start hatin’ on those island barons either — they’re often screaming in the Concierge queue with islands that are down, won’t work, crash, or don’t let people rez objects, and their vacancy rates are nearly as low as mainland vacancy rates now.

THE BETTER MATH OF MALLS

Why do so many of the nation-keepers turn to clubs, malls, and casinos? The math here is better if you can squeeze, say, 120 vendors on to your shopping sim, extract $450 US in rents (say L$1000 per month per unit), pay the $295 tier, and have $155 US recouped to help pay back your island purchase in 10 months. Hmmm. Better go mainland, have $255 left and not think about paying the $2200 initial cost back so soon, or at least put in some camp chairs, casinos, soak out more income to shorten that to a less painful 4 or 6, or you begin to wonder: why didn’t I just leave the same money in the real-life stock market or money-market on PayPal???

Now can you see why there are malls and casinos everywhere? It’s a cycle that begins with the never-ending glut of $1000 opening-bid mainland auction sims; following through to the $2200-$3400 auction buy and frenzied chop and sell or develop-and-rent — and leads inexorably to the feeding of the Lindens’ bottom line and the conclusion by the now hardened landlord that he has to open a mall or a club with sexy clothing in vendors to make ends meet.

The tipping point for getting out of the cycle of fearfully watching vacancy rates plummet, never having enough land to satisfy period surges in demand, seems to come at about 32-38 private islands, after about 6 months — those barons that cross that threshold seem to assure themselves income, if they can avoid the temptation of putting all that income into “growth” which equals “over-exposure of risk”. But with the growth and competitiveness of SL, this threshold number is likely to double inexorably — at what point does it become madly risk-laden?

DESTROYING THE LAND BARON CLASS=DESTROYING THE ECONOMY

So why is it a good thing if land prices plummet? It’s temporarily a good thing for those people who fly around shopping and then finally wish to find their dream 2048 or 4096 to put down their McMansion and cyber on. But by impoverishing the “landbaron” class that can no longer rent or sell, the socialists, the airheaded shoppers, the cybering masses who hate paying a lot, are gutting out the only form of income production in SL available for the unskilled long-hours-labouring middle class — the equivalent of Korean deli owners sending their kids to college. Not everyone can script, design, build, and make beautiful prefabs for $3000 or $10,000 a pop or sex beds selling for $45 US per unit. Content makers, unlike rental agents, can put out a vendor inworld and leave it to ka-ching all day while they play WoW or do RL jobs. Many people turn to rentals work because it’s *what there is* — until the economy becomes far more rich and diversified it’s not only what keeps the Lindens’ bottom line fed, it’s what keeps the engine of the inworld economy fed. Don’t forget that the “landbaron” you’re renting in fact may not even make a profit; in fact he may barely make tier and is actually *paying for* the privilege of playing store. And content-makers can’t forget that they can’t live off third-party shopping sites — they really the presence in world to get sales, and that means owning or renting land for stores and vendors — and facing high rents, and the same slump everybody else faces.

If land barons see that this already really thinly-margined highly risky business venture is made even more ridiculous by plummetting land prices, problems with buying Lindens, and less log-ons, they sell and pull out. That reduces investment in SL and purchases on the auction; but it also leaves the now highly diversified and reasonably-priced market to be seized by only 2-3 large oligarchs — which was exactly the story back in 2004-2005 when land only cost $6-7/meter. Then mall rents skyrocket in high-trafficked areas, island tiers increase, and there’s a slowing in sales, especially for people who can’t pay higher rent to display their stores and vendors . If it’s an impossibly hard balancing act for the Lindens, who have all the server-side data we don’t about real sales and peaks and slumps, for us, it really begins to look like an MLM scam.

“…MLM programs are set up to make most distributors fail, as there is a continued incentive to continue to recruit distributors even as the products have reached market saturation, thus causing the average earnings per distributor to continue to fall.”

By Prokofy Neva/Op-Ed

In Second Life, you can make a group with only 27 cents and one other person. Don’t like the group you’re in, because it’s taken over by a tyrant or filling up with griefers you don’t want to be associated with? Make a new one — and the tools enable you to create either a dope-smokin’ hippie love commune where everybody is exactly equal and income is distributed or a Gorean slave camp where a master rules with an iron fist and confiscates the earnings. It’s your world, your imagination. You are never stuck with an affiliation; you can always recreate, renew, reform — by making a new group and leaving an old one.

In Second Life, groups are an important part of identity and reputation. The first thing people use to judge an unknown avatar is his groups. So people usually take care to have the groups on their profile reflect their real intentions. When they discover they are in a group that acquires a bad reputation, they press “leave”. When they persistently do *not* press leave and keep on affiliating with a group acquiring a reputation for griefing, it’s because the core of the group, the friendships they’ve made are more important to them than their reputation, or they don’t care about having a good reputation. But people judge nonetheless — and they must, in a lawless, oppressive world, ruled by ruthless executive power (the Lindens), little reliable information (everyone is anonymous to some degree) and concerted propaganda and disinformation campaigns by warring parties.

GANGS VERSUS GROUPS

Guilt by association” may be an honourable liberal principle, the bedrock of “not guilty until proven innocent.” Yet it isn’t endless, and it can’t be used as a cover and a distraction from crime. In real life, gangs have all kinds of insignia and rituals — and they commit crimes, even murder. The police are right to watch thse groups as *groups*; if they didn’t, they couldn’t keep the public safe. When a Crip or Blood ties a certain bandana on their leg or head or makes a certain hand signal in a school, administrators and the police don’t think they’re doing a Home Ec sewing assignment or studying signing for the deaf. They realize that the attributes and membership features are what gives the group coherence and can abet crime; in some settings, such as a school, it is prohibited to wear the insignia of gangs precisely to prevent them from getting a toehold.

Principles, parents, the community weigh the problem of possibly wrongfully preventing an innocent kid from holding their pants up with an ordinary red scarf versus controlling the proliferation of gangs. Whether locally in schools, whether nationally in racist movements, whether internationally in extremist and terrorist movements, the non-state actor, and the non-state organization are the chief threats to the peace. This vexatious factor, the leading issue of our time, bedevils policy-makers and law-makers as they attempt to adjust to a new world accelerated by the Internet and social media that reduce the role of governments and older civil societies institutions like churches, trade unions, and volunteer clubs and in their place create amorphous, anonymous, unaccountable affiliations that can easily hide crime not only behind anonymity, but behind liberal assumptions about good will.

The self-making and self-franchising of malevolent non-state group or movement, whether racist extremists or terrorists — or in our own tiny snowglobe virtual analogy, griefers — pose an impossible challenge to civilization. Protecting values like freedom of assembly and the right not to be subject to “guilt by association” must be balanced against the need to protect all of society from crime and terrorism, and to prevent the malevolent and conspiratorial gang from exploiting liberal values even as they use them to cripple the liberal society and bend it to their own aims and power.

WHEN YOUR ASSOCIATES ARE GUILTY

Thinking about the Woodbury University saga, we can only ask for more and more information to come to light to make a judgement, and to make reasonable assessments based on patterns already visible in Second Life. If you have a group of some 200 people, and some 30 or 40 of them (many of them alts who have been banned and come and gone) are repeatedly found to be guilty of griefing (and indisputably so), at which point do you “call” it and say that many of the alts, hangers-on, accidental tourists and Eddie Haskellers of the outfit can’t be expected to count on avoidance of “guilt by association”? Many more of them could be stepping forward to claim innocence besides one student, Janelle, who says she is a clothier but has no clothing in world and a track record of harassment, and one “Ubiquitous Librarian”. Woodbury’s RL leadership could be commenting. Yet there is silence.

One thing is sure: the Lindens cannot be allowed to be the final arbitrers on these matters forever. Regrettably for the future of the Metaverse, they *are* these final arbitrators now, because *they have all the server-side information* and they can also punish those who attempt to provide adversarial defense through the distribution *inworld* of chatlogs and notecards. They have all the information; yet they aren’t talking. Their failure to act on this or that case isn’t proof, however, that they’ve exonerated a figure like Tizzers Foxchase — they haven’t (and if it is true that she’s lost a RL job associated with this project, her own employers seem less liberal — or gullible — than the Lindens). Sometimes the Lindens deliberately don’t ban group leaders to see if they go on perpetuating a conspiracy, so as to be able to entrap those often really doing the dirty work. Sometimes they may have enough circumstantial evidence, but even they like to build the case better.

BECOMING LIKE THE TERRORISTS?

In real life, if a figure like a “blind mullah” was incapable of actually performing any criminal acts, but was found to constantly sustaining, supporting, ideologically indoctrinating, recruiting, even directing subtly any terrorist act, they might find themselves indicted. Their lawyers might work hard to show them to be merely pious religious leaders whose views, even if extreme, aren’t grounds for prosecution. The Lindens — and all of us — find ourselves in a roughly analagous situation to the problem of terrorism and the “war on terrorism”: at what point do invasive procedures like wiretapping and racial profiling, gross violations of rights, defeat the purpose of the war on terrorism, and become like terrorism itself?

In Second Life, the Lindens wiretap with abandon and “racially” profile with aggressive zeal because they can — and because they have the information all on their side, on the servers. We can’t tell them not to wiretap; we all agreed they can monitor us at any time when we signed the TOS. We can’t tell them not to “racially profile,” i.e. identify by group affiliation — they have no checks and balances or rule of law to answer to, they are an unchecked executive power that protects its own grid first and foremost.

MASS BANNING OF 2005

Newer residents like Jessica Holyoke weren’t here in October 2005 when the Lindens made an unprecedented mass banning. They banned at least 25 people we could all identify as later missing; they said in fact the list contained 60 people. Philip announced it at a townhall. The bannings were all of W-hat and spinoffs in Voter-5/Voted-5 that had occupied the aptly-named sim “Satyr”. The bannings didn’t come in haste; they followed months and months — a year in some cases — of constant gridcrashing where all of Second Life itself was ground to a halt (this used to be routine, until the Lindens figured out a “fire lane” system that contained self-replicating objects). Some of the people banned loudly proclaimed they were suffering from “guilt by association,” but as their griefing, from petty to serious but serial and systematic, was amply documented and proved with server-side data, the Lindens didn’t blink. They sent a very clear message, more clear than their claim to have opened up an FBI case: keep forming groups for the malicious purpose of crashing sims and bothering other residents, and you will be banned, and if all you do is come on griefing posses and LULZ it up and provide textures, you’ll be banned too.

Since then, the people banned were sobered, and some began to turn to more positive pursuits (like Isometric/Decomposing Monstre and machinima) or seek rehabilitation (Plastic Duck) yet never free of rightful suspicions from the taint of their past crimes. Others continued to come back on alts belligerently, and kept being banned. They rang all the memes and chimes of the first groups or used those who were very much part of the culture and membership of griefing groups but had escaped the ban hammer like Anonamoose Letlow to reconstitute new groups and actions. Always, their cry was, “We’re reforming,” “We’re not like those few bad eggs,” “We’re going to be engaged in creative stuff now, honest” — even as they proceeded to go out *and do the exact same thing as they did on Satyr on Woodbury, right down to the letter. Woodbury got one round of warnings; seeing as it was much the same people doing the same thing as Satyr, the Lindens didn’t go below the bar set by their previous action: they confiscated the sim, continued to make bannings, and hoped that this would serve as enough of a deterrent.

HOW WILL JUSTICE BE JUST?

Now comes the question of how we must obtain justice, in an unjust world, where the deck is stacked against us.

The first issue to realize is that people can — and do, and will — ban on the basis of group affiliation, and absolutely nothing can stop them. When Ban-Link or its clone are GOM’d into the client and become a fact of Second Life, at one flip of the switch, huge, long lists can be added, even things like “all 200 members of Woodbury” and possible, under agitation from Angel Fluffy and other security-state advocates, lsl functions that can ban by group membership as well. We will see entire groups banned by affiliation, and there will be absolutely nothing anyone can do about it, and crying “no guilt by association” to the hardened and wizened club and rentals security goons will be pointless, as they weren’t born yesterday and know how to make snap judgements by instinct simply to protect their venue and their property values and their business. This isn’t a very pleasant world, but it’s not one anyone will be able to stop, as Angel Fluffy with his capture roleplay; Cindy Claveau with her frequently-griefed club; Travis Lambert with this newbie-helping operation at the Shelter; Intlibber Brautigun with his real-estate empire and other members of the group Pro-active Security all have ample motivation to ban on the basis of any marker they can muster, so as to protect their own interests — which the Lindens see aligned with their own interests.

POLICE BLOTTER AND FREE PRESS

The Lindens promise more aggregate information to come on the police blotter, to end the idiotic, memory-less rounds of Linden v. sandbox-shooter that serves as the blotter now — but that’s not going to contain names of residents. And that’s why I think communities have to make their own local police blotters, and keep them as local — and as tethered to a process of fact-gathering and correction as possible. Until the Lindens are prepared to emulate real life and publish all the elements of the case — the abuse report, the alleged perpetrator, the prosecuting Linden, the facts of the case and an adversarial defense — this is about as good as it will get.

In the police-informants’ state that the Lindens’ perfected and have now templated and readied for open-sourcing to the grid, the informant’s report — not even confession! — is the crown of evidence, as Vyshinsky used to say. No adversarial defense is really possible without a Law of Discovery — which involves confronting Lindens to turn over what evidence they have server-side — and there they’ll cry “confidentiality” of their subscribers and refuse cooperation. So as in RL police states, the population will have to count on the big security agencies, the police versus the intelligence, the presidential bodygards versus the corporation bodyguards of oligarchs — to leak kompromat, or compromising material on one another, to set up journalists with false or even selectively true information; to otherwise manipulate the system of information and law-enforcement to their ends.

In this horrible climate, only an independent press, able to keep covering the news without fear or favour, is absolutely vital and only to be expanded, not discouraged.

By Prokofy Neva

The story of Woodbury University — “Griefer U” — is now in the real-life Chronicle of Higher Education. You need a subscription to read the article (the link is just to the blog) — it’s one of those old-media proprietary establishments that needs a paid pass or sub, because the journalists and editors work for actual money, and advertisers help pay their bills — all strange concepts for the hacksters and script-kiddies of Second Life. Mark Wallace’s “guilt-by-association” meme is reproduced in the CHE — to the effect that the Woodbury U involves suppression of academic freedom and due process for property owners and failure to punish “the true digital criminals”. And Sean Fitzgerald, an Australian technology consultant, weighs in with his view that LL acted appropriately.

In any event, Woodbury U is emblematic of what’s wrong with Second Life — it’s just that the different factions left right, north, south, furry, norm, sandbox, settler can’t agree just what about the drama *is* wrong. Is it wrong because of “guilt by association” and “collective responsibility” and Lindens’ ostensibly heinous seizure of land without due process, nominally “for the good of the community” — a curious collectivized concept without legitimacy? Or is it wrong because griefers who are serial gridcrashers and determined conspiracists were able to infiltrate a goofy experimental college project whose designers should have been taken on faith as innocent? Or were the Woodbury U folks in on it all along? (That’s my theory).

Whatever the case, efforts even to ask questions about what really happened lead to outrageous attempts to silence reporters, from demonstrations calling for firing of journalists (such friends of free expression, eh?) to gridcrashing while goons and geeks with plausible deniability hover over the sim letting others with throw-away alt accounts pull the grid-crashing script triggers. So what else is new to say about it?

I’m waiting — as others are — to get answers to some of the basic questions like: Where is Dr. Clift’s supervisor? Are the board members apprised of this awful publicity generated by these scandals? Did Tizzers really get fired from her RL job — or was it really only an SL job (she still keeps the title on her avatar)? How come when you type in the course number and name of “Virtual Worlds” which was given here on the Herald comments, you are first guided to another course number, and then when you press on that, taken to a dead link? There is no such course — and indeed the School of Digital Arts in the Communications Department seems to be…not really started yet. So the mysterious commentor below who said essentially that the project was begun merely to impress the board, then let go astray and got purloined by PNs, but isn’t a conspiracy, begins to sound credible.

Why is it that I go on and on about a conspiracy? Well, because of all the many conversations I have had for months with Intlibber Brautigan, in April and May in which he made a remarkable trajectory. Now it can be told! First, he claimed that The Occurence at Woodbury was some kind of “social science experiment” about griefing (!), telling Random Unsung that the PNs funded the Woodbury sim (!), confiding that Tizzers Foxchase had invited the b/tards to make a base at Woodbury (!), and was spouting a cover story about Japanese iamges (hmm…sound familiar?)…then explaining that he had infiltrated Woodbury with his security people — and finally bragging that he had the Lindens doing his bidding getting them banned, then joining them and deciding my method of dealing with griefers — banning and putting names in a local police log for people to decide to include on their own parcel bans or not — was stupid.

But let the logs speak for themselves. Truly, these logs tell an amazing story, when read, and juxtaposed with all the subsequent claims and spins of Intlibber and the BNT gang. When you can’t get the comments to bring out the truth, Uri, go to the chatlogs. Here Random Unsung, Aging Hippie and erstwhile Night Manager at Ravenglass Rentals provides some insight:

2007-04-14 17:38:07

[14:24] Random Unsung: Hi, this “saturday attack” is probably a hoax just to tie people up in knots and distract them
[14:25] IntLibber Brautigan: No its not
[14:25] Random Unsung: I had Takit Leavitt attack the other day with huge plywood cubes and some other nasty goatse attack on a sim they always hit, but nothing else, not today
[14:25] Random Unsung: well have you seen any attacks yet?
[14:25] IntLibber Brautigan: thats because LL raided their bases yesterday
[14:25] IntLibber Brautigan: they HDD banned a bunch of them
[14:25] Random Unsung: yes Lindens told me today that they had gone to examine their objects
[14:26] IntLibber Brautigan: LL has also deleted a lot of weaponry off the asset servers
[14:26] Random Unsung: why has it taken so long to ban them
[14:26] IntLibber Brautigan: cause they wanted to nail them just before their big attack
[14:26] Random Unsung: well I couldn’t confirm that
[14:26] Random Unsung: I asked just that quesiton, knowing that the Lindens never met a script they didn’t like
[14:26] IntLibber Brautigan: PN was funding the Woodbury University sim
[14:26] Random Unsung: did they say that to you?
[14:26] IntLibber Brautigan: here’s some info for you
[14:26] Random Unsung: yes I had that news
[14:26] Random Unsung: that they were pretending to go legit and do emergency preparedness stuff
[14:28] IntLibber Brautigan: PN was also squatting the Paperboy & Co sim, whose owner seems to be quite absent
[14:28] Random Unsung: Hazim Gazov is still active constantly, LL never does a thing
[14:29] Random Unsung: which sim are “their bases” on? Are they still in Baku?
[14:30] Random Unsung: that’s where they always send me uninvited teleport requests
[14:30] IntLibber Brautigan: PN has not been in Baku
[14:30] IntLibber Brautigan: w-hat refused to work with them
[14:30] IntLibber Brautigan: /b/ in turn griefed baku and got banned
[14:30] Random Unsung: Hazim Gazov seems related to them, and he/she is always sending tp requests from Baku
[14:31] IntLibber Brautigan: Hazim is playing an interesting role.
[14:31] Random Unsung: You are so naive if you buy this crap that “W-hat refused to work with them” when they are the recruiters, aiders, abetters, substrate of the entire thing
[14:31] Random Unsung: um, well, don’t become so fascinated with the interesting role that you lose sight of the fact that these people cause business losses
[14:31] Random Unsung: I had Hazim leave a lovely texture on my voter machine that said “NEWBIE MURDERER” or some idiocy like that
[14:32] Random Unsung: because I was taking a poll about people’s attitude toward the unverified, in order to demonstrate that in facdt most people don’t have a problem with them
[14:32] Random Unsung: so she’s just plain stupid
[14:32] Random Unsung: for all her “interesting” qualities *cough*
[14:32] Random Unsung: Seriously IntLibber, I’ve been dealing with these people for 3 years. They play many manipulative games, as you well know.
[14:32] Random Unsung: And the chief one they play is the concept that one of them is “reforming” or “not working with others” or “taking them legit”
[14:32] Random Unsung: it’s all FAKE
[14:33] IntLibber Brautigan: Actually Hazim left a sign that said something like “Lets just murder the homeless”
[14:33] IntLibber Brautigan: it was a Swiftian comment
[14:34] Random Unsung: Um, you seem very well informed on Hazim’s activities, do you back them?
[14:34] Random Unsung: and it’s stupid, because i have regularly posted about the meaning of this voter, which proves my SUPPORT of the unverified with the facts of people’s attitude
[14:35] Random Unsung: it’s not about murdering the homeless
[14:35] IntLibber Brautigan: I don’t back them
[14:35] Random Unsung: and I really do have to WONDER how you know WHAT is on the griefing sign on MY FUCKING LAND
[14:35] Random Unsung: hello?
[14:35] IntLibber Brautigan: I’ve been making a point of educating myself about them
[14:35] IntLibber Brautigan: Hazim send me a picture
[14:35] Random Unsung: uh=uh
[14:35] Random Unsung: um, I do want to remind you that things like that scare away business, and cause actual US dollar losses
[14:35] IntLibber Brautigan: yes they do
[14:36] Random Unsung: so whiile I realize you are “fascinated’ with the ” itneresting” and think you are oh=so-intellectual for sussing them out, it’s crap
[14:36] Random Unsung: total crap
[14:36] Random Unsung: they are manipulative fucks
[14:36] Random Unsung: they will get you
[14:36] Random Unsung: indeed, they already have gotten you if you can’t grasp the essence of the communist Big Lie that lies back of this Leninst group

2007-04-22 03:01:48
[23:00] IntLibber Brautigan: (Saved Sun Apr 22 01:33:39 2007) random, you on?
[23:01] Random Unsung: hello?
[23:02] IntLibber Brautigan: [22:30] IntLibber Brautigan: [21:44] Tizzers Foxchase: How do I contact the Lindens in the game? [21:44] Entjemyma Panacek: best not to [21:44] Tizzers Foxchase: Explain. [21:44] Entjemyma Panacek: well were a terrorist group [21:44] Tizzers Foxchase: No, we are not. [21:44] Entjemyma Panacek: and have a base down there [21:45] Lobo Kong: IM Heretic Linden, I hear she is online [21:45] Entjemyma Panacek: yes we are [22:30] IntLibber Brautigan: [21:55] Tizzers Foxchase: I’m going to say it right now, if anybody in this group admits to griefing I WILL KICK YOU OUT. The University does not condone these actions and will not be held responsible for them. [21:56] Tizzers Foxchase: Honestly, I could care less what you do on your alts.
[23:02] IntLibber Brautigan is typing…
[23:02] IntLibber Brautigan: Tizzers Foxchase runs the Woodbury University sim
[23:02] IntLibber Brautigan: she works for the RL univ
[23:03] Random Unsung: Hmm, so you think it’s just infiltrated? or what?
[23:03] IntLibber Brautigan: no they have had a big base there for a while
[23:04] IntLibber Brautigan: we got their sim seized during the attacks last weekend
[23:04] IntLibber Brautigan: they used their academic credentials to get the sim back
[23:04] Random Unsung: well but if they say they will not condone it, but then say they “could care less” about alts, it’s odd
[23:04] IntLibber Brautigan: they are doing a social science experiment
[23:04] Random Unsung: well what the hell is up?
[23:04] Random Unsung: well that’s just great, that only encourages and validates griefing
[23:04] IntLibber Brautigan: the PN is a social science experiment in terrorism
[23:04] IntLibber Brautigan: and we are the guinea pigs
[23:04] Random Unsung: Well, I am not exactly buying that
[23:05] IntLibber Brautigan: unauthorized unethical human experimentation
[23:05] Random Unsung: I think the PN is organized of its own, and these Woodbury people have seized on them
[23:05] Random Unsung: and made a deal with them
[23:05] IntLibber Brautigan: the professor MC Fizgig
[23:05] IntLibber Brautigan: I have him in a PN outfit
[23:05] Random Unsung: and yes, that’s really sick, and the Lindens used to have very strict codes for governing experimentation
[23:05] Random Unsung: but they’ve thrown it out the window
[23:05] Random Unsung: after the marketing people came in
[23:05] IntLibber Brautigan: I have a nice pic for you to put in the herald
[23:05] Random Unsung: now there’s just a sort of blank where their essay used to be on this in the Knowledge Base
[23:06] Random Unsung: You know, I haven’t been following everything about the Woodbury stuff, when did it start?
[23:06] IntLibber Brautigan: I only found out about it two days before the big raid
[23:06] IntLibber Brautigan: JLU has been infiltrating them for longer
[23:07] IntLibber Brautigan: I have a chatlog of Tizzers specifically inviting the /b/tards to build a base
[23:07] Random Unsung: can you send the screenshot to dyerbrookME@juno.com because recopying out of SL only works to make those tga files that don’t upload well
[23:07] IntLibber Brautigan: okay
[23:08] IntLibber Brautigan: now that they have the sim back, they are rebuilding the base
[23:08] IntLibber Brautigan: calling it a ‘museum’
[23:09] Random Unsung: I’m looking at it now
[23:10] Random Unsung: how could it be that the Lindens would seize it, but then give it back?
[23:10] IntLibber Brautigan: cause thy must have a research contract deal
[23:10] Random Unsung: somehow, the feel of the PNs isn’t that they were merely created by a university, I think they exist on their own, but some deal is made
[23:10] Random Unsung: but LL doesn’t make research contracts
[23:11] IntLibber Brautigan: I suspect maybe the University has a contract with the Dept of Homeland Security to study terrorism
[23:11] Random Unsung: they used to shepherd in educational groups with their own last names and sims and whatnot, but they gave that up some time ago, there is too great a demand
[23:11] Random Unsung: I’m finding it hard to believe that they would take a thing like that off their sim.
[23:12] Random Unsung: And pursue people into the mainlands and destroy property.
[23:12] IntLibber Brautigan: there are three objectives I think they are itnerested in
[23:12] IntLibber Brautigan: and my suspicions have been confirmed by people with degrees in behavior psychology and mind control
[23:13] IntLibber Brautigan: a) study the mentalities of the types of losers attracted to commit terrorism, hate crimes, etc
[23:13] IntLibber Brautigan: b) study hwo to manipulate memes and propaganda that preexist to make a terrorist movement more or less virulent
[23:13] IntLibber Brautigan: c) study how societies react to terrorist activities
[23:14] IntLibber Brautigan: Prok, you know diplomacy, I know war, I’m a veteran, I recognise psywar ops when i see them
[23:15] IntLibber Brautigan: I recognise the griefers may have preexisted ina less virulent form
[23:15] IntLibber Brautigan: IMHO they have been made more virulent since Mudkips joined.
[23:16] IntLibber Brautigan: BTW: Mudkips lives in Burbank CA, where Woodbury campus is located
[23:16] Random Unsung: well something’s up for sure yes, but Mudkips isn’t the most virulent, he takes the time to post more literary things on forums
[23:16] IntLibber Brautigan: yes
[23:16] IntLibber Brautigan: like an academic
[23:16] IntLibber Brautigan: a propagandist
[23:16] IntLibber Brautigan: he’s not a storm trooper
[23:17] IntLibber Brautigan: he’s a yassir arafat
[23:17] IntLibber Brautigan: he never puts the bomb belt on himself
[23:18] IntLibber Brautigan: Here’s more possible evidence that they have a homeland security contract:
[23:18] IntLibber Brautigan: Tizzers has obtained my military records, so she says
[23:18] Random Unsung: oh geez
[23:18] Random Unsung: talking to him now
[23:33] IntLibber Brautigan: I’ll bet she’s giving you the cover story about preserving 4chan culture and art etc etc
[23:33] IntLibber Brautigan: ask her if she thinks its so important to preserve that stuff, why is she hiding it in the basement, and not putting it on display in a public museum for the public to appreciate?
[23:35] Random Unsung: [23:00] IntLibber Brautigan is Online [23:00] Cub Water Club Tower $200 Apt 5: A rental has expired. [23:00] St. Paul’s Cathedral: Received donation of L$20 from Katja Flanagan. [23:00] Cub Water Club Tower $200 Apt 5: Store rented for 7 days… [23:00] Teemu Sands gave you Please Add. [23:00] Second Life: Your object ‘Candlestick’ has been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by the Velvet from parcel ‘the Velvet: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1922 – 2007′ at Iron Fist 231.363, 68.1525 due to parcel owner return. [23:06] Moth Temple Preserve: Received donation of L$100 from Patrick Leavitt. [23:07] IntLibber Brautigan gave you MC Fizgig of Patriotic Nigras. [23:15] Moot Kappler shouts: WHO LEFT THE AGING HIPPIE UP HERE [23:15] You: Hey there [23:15] You: is it true that you are studying terrorism by making up a fake griefer group? [23:15] You: : ) [23:15] Moot Kappler: who told you that [23:15] You: well I’m checking out the story [23:15] You: are you a bot? you don’t have a face [23:16] Mo
[23:35] Random Unsung: oops wait
[23:35] Random Unsung: she’s saying the university has no control over the sim
[23:36] Random Unsung: you need to send this to the university president hang on
[23:37] IntLibber Brautigan: ok
[23:39] IntLibber Brautigan: cool
[23:40] IntLibber Brautigan: That school of Media and Culture used to be called the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies
[23:40] IntLibber Brautigan: its run by a Dr. Cremer
[23:40] IntLibber Brautigan: I send him a post to his blog the other day
[23:40] IntLibber Brautigan: the next day i was IP banned from the whole Woodbury website.
[23:44] IntLibber Brautigan: BTW: They know you are Prokofy
[23:45] IntLibber Brautigan: Hazim has been hanging out there, he knows you are prokofy
[23:45] Random Unsung: oh sure I know, Hazim is a frequent flyer
[23:45] Random Unsung: I’m just seeing what I get out of them
[23:46] IntLibber Brautigan: Tizzers herself belonged to /b/SUPREMACY until saturday
[23:46] IntLibber Brautigan: quit it to save her ass
[23:46] Random Unsung: well she’s trying to draw me off into a private convo now, I think I’ll pass
[23:46] IntLibber Brautigan: nah see what you can dig from that
[23:46] IntLibber Brautigan: she might spill some stuff
[23:46] IntLibber Brautigan: she knows the heat is getting turned up
[23:50] Random Unsung: well the usual collection of asstards
[23:52] Random Unsung: it seems more likely it’s a student who has convinced some wealthy donor or professor to get this island and he odesn’ thave time to watch it
[23:53] Random Unsung: and she’s just doing the usual stupid kid thing on it
[23:53] Random Unsung: Trustifarians would be my diagnosis.
[23:55] Random Unsung: the girl is not bright, and not doing any study, it’s retarded
[23:55] Random Unsung: see the Woodbury website could be handled by kids, adults often do that, even at a university, those kids are 4 channers and they block you
[23:56] Random Unsung: that’s why a fax or snail mail to the president would be in order if you had time to bother
[23:56] IntLibber Brautigan: I’m going to pursue that

2007-04-23 04:12:37
0:40] Random Unsung: Edward M. Clift, Communication, Woodbury University Premonition as profit: Hyper-capitalism and the cultivation of anxiety
[0:41] Random Unsung: http://www.russcomm.ru/eng/rca_news/2006/2006_07_01.shtml
[0:41] IntLibber Brautigan: nice
[0:41] IntLibber Brautigan is typing…
[0:41] Random Unsung: Does it get more clear than that?!
[0:41] IntLibber Brautigan: btw: They dropped 7 of my sims this morning
[0:41] IntLibber Brautigan: three tonite
[0:42] Random Unsung: how do you mean “dropped”?
[0:42] Random Unsung: I’ve written a query to Edward about his sim in SL
[0:42] IntLibber Brautigan: dropped as in crashed
[0:42] Random Unsung: I’ve had Hazim pay a rental box that doesn’t exist, which is very wierd
[0:43] Random Unsung: I can’t find any grief building however — yet
[0:43] Random Unsung: are they using that Grid crasher they’ve described?’
[0:43] IntLibber Brautigan: not here
[0:43] IntLibber Brautigan: we’re not mainland
[0:45] IntLibber Brautigan: oh, woodbury crashed too
[0:45] Random Unsung: interesting
[0:46] IntLibber Brautigan: Socrates Linden says theya re monitoring Woodbury very closely
[0:46] Random Unsung: well if they monitored it so closely, these goons would be gone by now
[0:46] Random Unsung: geez, that’s retarded
[0:46] Random Unsung: I mean, read the transcript from last night
[0:46] IntLibber Brautigan: esp after the griefing of the Virginia Tech memorial
[0:46] Random Unsung: they are so transparent
[0:46] Random Unsung: yes did you see Hazim threatened that on my blog?
[0:46] Random Unsung: I didn’t see it right away
[0:46] Random Unsung: what did they do?
[0:46] IntLibber Brautigan: they are calling Cho a “real american hero”
[0:47] Random Unsung: buridan has me banned and muted so I couldn’t reach him and the others weren’t responding
[0:47] Random Unsung: ugh
[0:47] IntLibber Brautigan: demanded that he be included in the memorial
[0:47] IntLibber Brautigan: they were using alts named GICHOAREALAMERICANHERO Hax, etc
[0:47] Random Unsung: horrible
[0:49] IntLibber Brautigan: btw: they were using the Prokofy dolls to impersonate you
[0:49] IntLibber Brautigan: FlipperA Peregrine bought it and thought you griefed the memorial
[0:49] Random Unsung: oh geez
[0:49] Random Unsung: I would never do such a thing
[0:49] IntLibber Brautigan: I know
[0:49] IntLibber Brautigan: you need to talk with him
[0:50] Random Unsung: buridan banned me when I came there merely because he’s a dick, with a long history of coming and griefing my events
[0:50] Random Unsung: I typed one sentence and he banned me
[0:50] IntLibber Brautigan: was this JT Buridan?
[0:50] Random Unsung: no I don’t talk to idiots like Flipper
[0:50] Random Unsung: no
[0:50] Random Unsung: buridan the joiito guy
[0:50] IntLibber Brautigan: dunno him
[0:50] Random Unsung: JT Buridan I think is in my tenants’ group
[0:50] Random Unsung: I’ve never seen any activity from him
[0:50] IntLibber Brautigan: JT Buridan is a griefer
[0:50] Random Unsung: I mean burdian
[0:51] IntLibber Brautigan: He runs a group called Merczateers Resistance Forces
[0:51] Random Unsung: right I see that now, they’re awful
[0:51] IntLibber Brautigan: was kicked out of the real mercz for griefing
[0:51] Random Unsung: I had to fight them in the sim Nick Rhodes
[0:51] IntLibber Brautigan: Mercz are fine
[0:51] IntLibber Brautigan: MRF are griefers
[0:51] Random Unsung: I don’t care for people who put up Soviet insignia
[0:51] IntLibber Brautigan: I’m sure
[0:51] IntLibber Brautigan: the real Mercz are just doing role playing
[0:51] IntLibber Brautigan: its SL combat under SLSALT
[0:52] IntLibber Brautigan: they rent one of my sims for their base
[0:52] Random Unsung: yes generally they don’t grief in terms of getting on the police blotter
[0:52] IntLibber Brautigan: they help me a lot with defense
[0:53] IntLibber Brautigan: Oh I have a story youd’ find enjoyable
[0:53] IntLibber Brautigan: one of the Mercz, Jonathan Arna
[0:53] IntLibber Brautigan: hes a RL cop
[0:53] IntLibber Brautigan: was their General of MPs
[0:53] IntLibber Brautigan: built their HQ building, a copy of the kremlin
[0:53] IntLibber Brautigan: he left the Mercz
[0:53] IntLibber Brautigan: sold the rights to the building to the Alliance Navy
[0:53] IntLibber Brautigan: AN attacked the sim, turned the building physical, and blew it up
[0:55] Random Unsung: hmmm
[0:56] Random Unsung: now there was a guy who was a RL cop that I knew under another name, from Columbus, OH that was more of a griefer than a cop
[0:56] Random Unsung: anyway, I’m not here to rp police with kids, I don’t want them

2007-04-26 05:11:58
[1:35] Random Unsung: Did you see the latest on Woodbury?
[1:35] Random Unsung: I got an answer from Clift, and it was snarky.
[1:36] IntLibber Brautigan: no whats up?
[1:36] Random Unsung: I wrote him asking for a comment on the antics there.
[1:36] Random Unsung: He wrote back with a reply that he would only speak to Reuters, the LA times, or the Chronicle of Higher Education
[1:36] Random Unsung: that what kind of reporter would seek a comment from him AFTER the story was done, blah blah
[1:37] Random Unsung: so I wrote back saying that the story had aged 2 weeks at least and cried out for coverage, and couldn’t wait for him to surface
[1:37] Random Unsung: nobody who had IM’d him in world or emailed him had answers, though in fact I didn’t write to him until after the article was up, but so what? Whoever heard of having to delay news coverage merely because one source is AWOL?
[1:37] Random Unsung: i mean AFK or whatever
[1:38] Random Unsung: so then I asked Robin Linden in the office hours: what’s up with Woodbury? What was LL doing about? She said “we have written the professor” and didn’t have a reply yet
[1:38] Random Unsung: so when I got my answer, I forward it to Robin and said, “Watch out, he’s in on it”
[1:38] Random Unsung: and she wrote back”It would be helpful if he didn’t get his 15 minutes of fame”
[1:39] IntLibber Brautigan: good
[1:39] Random Unsung: well I’m not sure how to read what she’s saying, whether that constitutes an acknolwedgement that he’s a problem
[1:40] Random Unsung: I’m fairly certain he *is* a problem
[1:40] IntLibber Brautigan: yes i do too
[1:40] IntLibber Brautigan: academics can be assholes,
[1:40] IntLibber Brautigan: definitely don’t believe in freedom of speech for others
[1:40] Random Unsung: oh totally, and Marxism is entrenched in these universities
[1:41] Random Unsung: well a normal academic, even some Marxist, would say, oh, I’ll check on that
[1:41] Random Unsung: but the fact that he was on the defensive tryingto discredit the very questioning process
[1:41] Random Unsung: that lets me know he’s in on it
[1:41] Random Unsung: but what the whole thing is really about remains opaque
[1:41] IntLibber Brautigan: some tried to force my grad student cousin to make me retract internet postings I’d made on global warming cause i talked about the socialist agenda of the Club of Rome
[1:41] Random Unsung: oh totally
[1:41] IntLibber Brautigan: other good news
[1:42] Random Unsung: the question is whether this is an FSB op of a typical variety designed to undermine Western youth, etc.
[1:42] Random Unsung: or whether it is merely this guy’s one wacky sectarian caper
[1:42] Random Unsung: or both, feeding into each other, accidently
[1:42] IntLibber Brautigan: Teeple and Blue Linden are giving defenders verbal consent to use blitzing and orbiting against griefers
[1:42] Random Unsung: where are they saying that?
[1:42] IntLibber Brautigan: said it to AlexanderJohn Herman
[1:42] Random Unsung: well they’ll have to say it once those new tools go in
[1:42] Random Unsung: in the forums or only in room chat?
[1:42] IntLibber Brautigan: in sim chat
[1:43] IntLibber Brautigan: Alexander asked what he could do against their attacks
[1:43] IntLibber Brautigan: Teeple asked if he had psitec
[1:43] Random Unsung: well ultimately, they have to stop prosecuting people who shoot griefers
[1:43] IntLibber Brautigan: he said yes
[1:43] IntLibber Brautigan: Teeple said, then use it
[1:43] Random Unsung: interesting
[1:43] Random Unsung: I haev repeatedly asked whether they wll end prosecution of chatlog distributors and users of weapons against griefers, they won’t respond
[1:44] IntLibber Brautigan: actually, he said specifically “Then you know what to do”
[1:44] Random Unsung: I asked again about the chat log in Robin’s office hours, she wouldnt’ respond
[1:44] Random Unsung: oh well that gives him deniability
[1:44] Random Unsung: I bet they won’t go ont he record with that tho
[1:44] IntLibber Brautigan: I believe it tends to vary among lindens, depending on what country they are from
[1:44] IntLibber Brautigan: American lindens I think are much more self defense oriented
[1:45] IntLibber Brautigan: the euro and aussie ones are much less so
[1:45] Random Unsung: well i had to deal with this Sejong Lidnen, and I tore him a new one
[1:45] Random Unsung: I have a voting poll on my property, perfectly legal
[1:45] Random Unsung: which raises the generic question: what should we do about grief builds? right next door is a deliberate provocative punkstore that bought waterfront to annoy everyone
[1:45] Random Unsung: and sure, people can do what they like on their land and build punk stores on beautiful waterfront
[1:46] Random Unsung: but then I can do what I like on my land, too, and have a poll about whether to boycott this business or how to handle it
[1:46] Random Unsung: so Sejong just comes and removes that
[1:46] IntLibber Brautigan: right
[1:46] IntLibber Brautigan: oh?
[1:46] Random Unsung: eys
[1:46] IntLibber Brautigan: thats not right
[1:46] Random Unsung: he manually contacts me inworld, with no due process
[1:46] Random Unsung: illustrating he’s a resident-turned-Linden with an axe to grind
[1:46] IntLibber Brautigan: is he asian?
[1:46] Random Unsung: he’s new, but has all this help info on his profile that lets me know he’s a Lindesident
[1:46] Random Unsung: yes Korean evidently but U.S. citizen he told me
[1:47] Random Unsung: so anyway, I tore him a new one and told him I would absolutely publicize the shit out of this, it was wrong
[1:47] Random Unsung: he lectuerd me about how we all had to get along, and I couldn’t have something criticizing my neighbours and it was “against the community”
[1:47] Random Unsung: and I said bullshit, this guy is “against the ocmmunity” by building shit on waterfront when we all have appropriate stuff
[1:47] IntLibber Brautigan: What I suggest is when you do stuff like that now, is contact a linden who is favorable to you to approve, so if sejong or others give you crap, you fob them off onto that linden
[1:47] Random Unsung: well what I did was finally tell hinm that I had AR’d him
[1:47] Random Unsung: he then contacted his superior
[1:47] IntLibber Brautigan: good
[1:48] Random Unsung: he got back to me and said, well put it out if you must but it’s against the community
[1:48] Random Unsung: I said, bullshit, you can’t define what a community is on my sim
[1:48] IntLibber Brautigan: right
[1:48] Random Unsung: I then protested to Robin as she is nominally in charge of these people, but not really
[1:48] IntLibber Brautigan: well your problem is you are a mainlander
[1:48] Random Unsung: I have islands too
[1:48] IntLibber Brautigan: yes
[1:48] Random Unsung: but I am resisting their concept of tool-induced covenants
[1:48] IntLibber Brautigan: on islands, you are the queen
[1:48] Random Unsung: I want covenants that people establish in groups on their sims to count too
[1:49] IntLibber Brautigan: sure
[1:49] IntLibber Brautigan: I totally think residents of mainland sims should be able to choose their own governance
[1:49] Random Unsung: they only recognize tool-based covenants but I feel it’s worth fighting
[1:49] Random Unsung: well you can to a point
[1:49] Random Unsung: but they don’t recognize it
[1:49] IntLibber Brautigan: well if a sim resident group votes to have a covenant in their sim, it should be applied by LL to their sim
[1:49] Random Unsung: ultimately, your only solution is to buy the island which now has more tier
[1:49] Random Unsung: well they claim they wlil have something like that
[1:49] Random Unsung: it opens up problems of course
[1:50] Random Unsung: 20 people who own 16 m2 parcels with grief signs could vote to have a covenant of grief signing and the rest of us owning on that sim will be blocked by majoritarian rule
[1:50] Random Unsung: so I have urged them to make it by meters, and of course that goes against their nutty egalitarianism
[1:51] IntLibber Brautigan: of course it should be by meters
[1:51] IntLibber Brautigan: and a 16 meter parcel shouldn’t have a vote, too small to be a residence
[1:51] Random Unsung: When telehub mall owners demanded and got the meeting with Philip Linden in 2005
[1:51] Random Unsung: he told us unequivocally: land will not be recognized as stake in this world
[1:51] IntLibber Brautigan: well it does in my estate
[1:51] Random Unsung: well they could undo the 16 m2 nonsense by making no parcel sell if it is under 256 m2
[1:52] IntLibber Brautigan: I apportion lag by land area
[1:52] Random Unsung: yes well I challenged him to explain why his business makes land a stake and sells it, thereby valuing it
[1:52] Random Unsung: but then he devalues it and calls it no stake once it is in my hands
[1:52] Random Unsung: that’s pretty fucked
[1:53] IntLibber Brautigan: so is Clift MC Fizgig or this Farland character?
[1:54] IntLibber Brautigan: another sim you should look at is Paperboy and Co
[1:54] IntLibber Brautigan: PN uses that as a weapons test sim
[1:54] IntLibber Brautigan: its apparently abandoned by the owner
[1:54] Random Unsung: yes I saw those messages
[1:54] IntLibber Brautigan: but tier is paid
[1:54] Random Unsung: Clift is Fizgig I think
[1:54] IntLibber Brautigan: ok
[1:54] IntLibber Brautigan: they have a MASSIVE base in Paperboy
[1:54] Random Unsung: do you think PN just moved in on a sim that this professor left untended, or is there more to it?
[1:55] Random Unsung: how do they set objects?
[1:55] IntLibber Brautigan: I am sure Tizzers is in on it and works for the prof
[1:55] IntLibber Brautigan: Paperboy and Co is public build
[1:55] IntLibber Brautigan: the owner appears to be japanese
[1:55] Random Unsung: if she whitewashes 4chan she has to be
[1:55] Random Unsung: ok
[1:56] Random Unsung: has anyone snapshooted or reliably placed who did the attack on Kula?
[1:56] IntLibber Brautigan: dont know
[1:56] IntLibber Brautigan: AlexanderJohn Herman and his air cavalry have been patrolling all the sandboxes
[1:56] Random Unsung: Is the Justice League this guy California Candor? or what is it?
[1:57] IntLibber Brautigan: JLU is doing its thing
[1:57] IntLibber Brautigan: oh, Hazim created Juice League Ultimate
[1:57] Random Unsung: oh
[1:57] Random Unsung: it’s a knock-off then
[1:57] IntLibber Brautigan: yes
[1:57] IntLibber Brautigan: he’s made a Kool-Aid avatar for the group
[1:58] IntLibber Brautigan: Hazim has a significant facility in paperboy
[1:58] Random Unsung: yes I should go screenshot I’ve just been too busy
[1:58] Random Unsung: well he’s lying about not being involved in the Kula attack surely
[1:59] IntLibber Brautigan: yes, Hazim is a serious character
[1:59] Random Unsung: Hazim is definitely the same person who was in the old Voted-5, and Kerian’s attempt to claim it isn’t the same person is merely a distraction
[1:59] IntLibber Brautigan: yes
[2:00] IntLibber Brautigan: geobbels law
[2:00] Random Unsung: this person goes way back like 2 years to the WTC
[2:00] IntLibber Brautigan: their comments to your articles are illustrative merely of their current stable of lies
[2:01] Random Unsung: oh totally, and that’s fine, it was created to give them a place to post their latest roster of lies
[2:01] Random Unsung: it’s interesting that in this thread, where they feel it’s “already about them” they refrain from the kind of race-baiting and vulgarity they impose on other stories
[2:01] IntLibber Brautigan: because you are in their living room
[2:02] Random Unsung: I generally refrain from talking to them, or speaking to them directly, or responding to them
[2:02] IntLibber Brautigan: confronting them on their turf puts them on the defensive
[2:02] Random Unsung: because that’s all part of legitimizing them, when they goad me inworld, I never respond, nor report on it, nor answer them directly
[2:02] IntLibber Brautigan: A good friend of mine was a juvie cop
[2:02] IntLibber Brautigan: he used to do his job very well
[2:02] Random Unsung: yes, well I thought the Woodbury thing had risen to the point where you had to go visit and throw them into offensive and surprise
[2:02] IntLibber Brautigan: by going around every night to where the kids hung out
[2:03] Random Unsung: yes
[2:03] Random Unsung: they are used to thinking of their hangouts as sanctuaries
[2:03] IntLibber Brautigan: saying “hey what are we doing tonite”
[2:03] IntLibber Brautigan: they’d leave
[2:03] IntLibber Brautigan: group somewhere else
[2:03] IntLibber Brautigan: he’d show up ther
[2:03] IntLibber Brautigan: and every other place
[2:03] IntLibber Brautigan: they’d go home
[2:03] IntLibber Brautigan: job done
[2:04] IntLibber Brautigan: they are targeting Badnarik
[2:04] IntLibber Brautigan: crashed it 26 times in two weeks
[2:04] Random Unsung: geez
[2:04] IntLibber Brautigan: Massen is under attack now
[2:04] Random Unsung: I’m looking at Fizgig’s profile, he even has a classic PN picture of the pool’s out guy in his profile
[2:04] Random Unsung: a pctuer of their parade
[2:05] IntLibber Brautigan: but they are trying to get the Merczateers, who own that sim, to countergrief them
[2:05] IntLibber Brautigan: so they can file ARs on them
[2:05] Random Unsung: oh well in that sense, the end of the whole silly AR system is a good thing
[2:05] Random Unsung: it was mainly used to settle scores
[2:06] Random Unsung: why are the PN’s so fascinated with black people?
[2:06] Random Unsung: are they pathetic white boys lol?
[2:06] IntLibber Brautigan: its giving white boys victim status
[2:06] Random Unsung: yes
[2:06] IntLibber Brautigan: so anything they do is forgiven
[2:06] IntLibber Brautigan: if they cry racism
[2:07] Random Unsung: why is it only now we hear about Woodbury when these avatars go back to January?

2007-05-14 02:45:44
Random Unsung: What’s up with the anti-voter 5 group, is that in fact a voter 5 in it?
IntLibber Brautigan: which?
Random Unsung: Anti Voter 5, the group you are in
IntLibber Brautigan: yeah
IntLibber Brautigan: who is a voter 5?
Random Unsung: well the group is not visible
Random Unsung: what is your point with that group?
Random Unsung: you do realize that they always create “anti” groups as a distraction device
IntLibber Brautigan: heres the group charter: Voter 5 is full of a bunch of W-Hat alts and ne’er do well Goons who try to crash the grid. I hate them, and I want them to leave Second Life. I own land, and they keep leaving phallic objects on my e-lawn. If you are against Voter 5 and that griefing idiot Hazim Gazov, then feel free to join this group.
Random Unsung: well, that’s obviously them, making a fake group
Random Unsung: they do that all the time
IntLibber Brautigan: Well, Alamareca is an aspiring journalist, actually, sees you as a role model.
Random Unsung: um, rolls eyes
Random Unsung: have you decided to go over to the dark side, IntLibber?
IntLibber Brautigan: not at all
Random Unsung: You do realize that their claims to be “separate” or “hating” or “even attacking” w-hat are all fake
Random Unsung: the first thing each alt does when they log on
Random Unsung: is send me a TP to Baku
Random Unsung: that’s their way of signalling the connection
Random Unsung: Baku is w-hat’s home base
Random Unsung: the v-5 also always join “the largest and most pointless group every”

-30-

By Random Unsung, Dept. of Barn Doors of Perception Left Open After Horses of Delusion Are Stolen

{Herald stringer Aging Hippie Random Unsung has filed an interesting follow-up story to the whole Woodbury U saga, but I’ve had to do a little editing, as the old goat has been hitting the window pane hard again–Prokofy Neva.}

There I was, reading about the casinos back again Serious Games which we have now in Second Life, like the one called 12 Monkey Gaming that has advertised its new services with a $250,000 Linden classified ad a grant from a prestigious foundation no doubt to do research, when suddenly, my IM window was leaving the most gorgeous multicoloured trails blinking.

I turned down “Black Peter” on my speakers and headed over to Ravenglass, which minutes before, the Lindens had just been brought back from down-hood after suddenly and mysteriously crashing hours before. A griefer posing as a tenant named Runny Panacek was in a panic, telling me a griefing attack an educational seminar was underway! I arrived to find epic oldbie Bonecrusher Slate’s garage in Ravenglass in a flurry of particles, weaponry, and heavily-decked and laggy avatars. At the center of the chaos, tossing her long, alternately red and blonde flexiprim hair, was Tizzers Foxchase, clearly orchestrating the griefing leading the educational field trip. Her partner, Runny, decked in a quasi-Nazi post-modern Godwinian outfit was flying around apparently cooperating with being victimized by the griefers. “Well,” sez I to meself, “This is clearly a fake stunt class essay exercise designed to appear as if these people have nothing to do with griefing exemplify the creative outlets of Second Life”. The following pictures are Not Safe for Work Illustrate the Wonders of the Human Body Which We Should Acknowledge as Precious and Beautiful.

I pushed my wire-rim glasses up my nose, and dodged the nasty helpful comments about me having a male avatar and allegedly wacking off to it. I noticed that the 12 people here swirling around Tizzers, at the center of the storm, were a *different* 12 people than have been mentioned before, which only proves that this is a systematic and planned group conspiracy there are still 178 other Woodbury members who are innocent.

I took names, and tried to eject some of the people, as they were starting to be annoying useful contacts I could learn more from. As often happens in these situations, I kept getting that wierd error message, “You are not the owner of this land” when I tried to eject some of them, which is no doubt a hack paralyzing the normal SL viewer they’ve cooked up with libsl’s help a useful deterrent to overaggressive evil landlord obstruction to freedom of movement.

Here are some of the names, I couldn’t catch all of them: Tizzers Foxchase, Dicky Pink, Daeynaries Lane, Aruk Barbosa, Iddoh Korobase, Kurtis Anatine, Jeeves Lazarno, Nidol Slazar, Thrax Trilam.

The dialogue was offensive instructional, Tizzers was front and center aiding and abetting the griefers by her presence and support giving a lecture on land valuation and ontological displacement of the self in virtualized encounters, when suddenly I noticed a typical racist PN Jellowned texture particle blast a work of art celebrating the African-American people’s contribution to world culture go out over the entire sim of Ravenglass. I hurried over to the stores of my tenants, closing them to business, unfortunately, until I could get at the particle problems. Some tenants began to gather behind me in alarm; one who was trying to join the group and new was upset that he couldn’t join, as I was forced to temporarily close the group.

Soon, Runny was whipping out a giant, ugly, flexiprim dong, an anatomically correct visual aid for a lesson on virtual property of the kind Lecktor Hannibal griefs does webinars with.

The visual aid kept flopping around and was really gross and disgusting educational and helpful.
Runny, who said he was Tizzers “Star Wars RP partner” and that’s why he was in the SL partner box, was riding it around obscenely tactfully illustrating the land values lecture.

I IM’d Interlibber to tell him he was a gullible old fool [have we checked with L yet on whether we can run with this?--PN] and he should come see his girlfriend fellow Hope Capital investor. He flew into a fit about being married in RL and not related to Tizzers, and claimed that the entire pack of griefing fucktards Digital Arts students were in face homeless legitimately stripped of their griefing land space and needed to have a new country declared at the UN for them called /b/tardestine.

As I watched the spinning coloured acid flowers remainders of the Jellowned particle blast float delightfully over Ravenglass, I wondered if I should abuse report these peeps. Prokofy had started a rule that we could not longer abuse report the b-tards or anybody because we have our own Police Blotter now. However, excepts were made once already for griefing in the Ross infohub on Linden Land. Since these grieftards students were now all on the Linden road out of Ravenglass carrying on with a giant dick and particles and stuff, educational aids, it seemed normal to AR them praise the Lindens for providing additional educational opportunities for the dear ones in Ravenglass, even after their beloved Woodbury U sim was removed from them for cause in a gross violation of human rights that Mark Wallace has gotten completely wrong in his 3-PointD story utterly condemned.

There was some proof that these peeps are racist and intolerant griefers an extended literary and cultural discussion in the chat log:

[15:50] Daeynaries Lane: ITS SUM HULAS
[15:50] Aruk Barbosa: Lulz
[15:50] Nidol Slazar: What about me?
[15:50] Aruk Barbosa: It’s sum faggotry
[15:51] Nidol Slazar: Who is that fgt?
[15:51] Aruk Barbosa: SO DAEY
[15:51] Aruk Barbosa: Wanna have an internet wedding too?
[15:51] Daeynaries Lane: YES BITCH TITS
[15:51] Daeynaries Lane: HELLZ NO
[15:51] Daeynaries Lane: YOU CAN DIE
[15:51] Aruk Barbosa: NO
[15:51] Aruk Barbosa: I WANT AN INTERWEBS WEDDING
[15:51] Daeynaries Lane: DIE DIE DIE DIE
[15:51] Dicky Pink: NIG-UHRS
[15:51] Aruk Barbosa: LOL
[15:52] Kiddoh Korobase: I thought Prok was a lady D:
[15:52] Kiddoh Korobase: I see an old dude
[15:52] Nidol Slazar: lol that’s Prok?..
[15:52] Dicky Pink: NO GURLS ON INTERNET
[15:52] Dicky Pink: HEY
[15:52] Kiddoh Korobase: huh
[15:52] Nidol Slazar: She can’t hear us.
[15:53] Dicky Pink: ass
[15:53] Aruk Barbosa: Lmao
[15:53] Kiddoh Korobase: We’re on mute? D:
[15:53] Dragonlady Dyrssen is Online
[15:53] Aruk Barbosa: Are you serious?
[15:53] Aruk Barbosa: Why does she have a male toon?
[15:53] Aruk Barbosa: Does she wack to it?
[15:53] Nidol Slazar: Yes, you can’t hear people that are banned from a land
[15:53] Nidol Slazar: If you’re on it
[15:53] Aruk Barbosa: LMAO
[15:53] Kiddoh Korobase: You think she’ll write an E-Story about it?
[15:53] Nidol Slazar: Someone put up Goatse
[15:54] Adriana Mimistrobell: your aids is making my sl crash
[15:54] Kiddoh Korobase: ooooh, she mentioned my name too!
[15:55] Aruk Barbosa: GUYS
[15:55] Aruk Barbosa: IMMA GREIFERSSSS
[15:55] Aruk Barbosa: UR WEBS
[15:55] Kiddoh Korobase: I’m on her e-grass with my grayscale Bridget shoes :O
[15:55] Nidol Slazar: lmao
[15:55] Dicky Pink: YESSSSS
[15:55] Aruk Barbosa: UALUEALUALEALEUEALEUEUALUEALUALEALEUEALEUEUALUEALUALE
[15:55] Aruk Barbosa: ALEUEALEUEUEALLUEAALUELAUELAUEUEALUELAUEUEALUELAUELAU
[15:55] Daeynaries Lane: IS THAT SUM COSBYS?
[15:55] Kurtis Anatine: OUR COSBY WILL BLOT OUT THE SUN

It was 40 Years Ago Today…